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Vol. XXXI 
 No. 2 
 
 PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW PUBLICATIONS 
 
 Whole No. 141 
 1922 
 
 Psychological Monographs 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 JAMES ROWLAND ANGELL, Yale University 
 HOWARD C. WARREN, Princeton University ( Review) 
 
 JOHN B. WATSON, New York (7. of Exp. Psychol.) 
 SHEPHERD I. FRANZ, Govt. Hosp. for Insane ( Bulletin ) and 
 MADISON BENTLEY, University of Illinois (Index) 
 
 psychological studies from 
 
 THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 EDWARD A. PACE 
 
 Professor of Philosophy 
 
 6 
 
 Percy Bysshe Shelley 
 
 An Introduction to the Study of Character 
 
 BY 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW COMPANY 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 and LANCASTER, PA. 
 
 Agents: G. E. STECHERT & CO., London (2 Star Yard, Carey St., W. C.) 
 
 Paris (16, rue de Conde) 
 
Copyrighted by 
 
 Thomas Verner Moore 
 
 1922 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction . i 
 
 Chapter I. The Analysis of Character. 6 
 
 Chapter II. Shelley’s Plan of Life . 12 
 
 Chapter III. Factors in the Development of Shelley’s 
 
 Plan of Life . 19 
 
 Chapter IV. Shelley’s Father Complex. 24 
 
 Chapter V. The Driving Forces in Shelley’s Life .... 33 
 
 Chapter VI. Hours of Conflict . 40 
 
 Chapter VII. The Compensations of Shelley . 47 
 
 Chapter VIII. Special Mental Traits . 54 
 
 Chapter IX. The Shelley Profile. 59 
 
 Chapter X. Evaluation of Shelley’s Plan of Life .... 60 
 

 
 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Our English word character comes from the Greek 
 which meant originally an instrument for engraving and stamp¬ 
 ing*. Corresponding to its derivation its first use in fourteenth 
 century English in the sense of a distinctive mark, a brand or 
 a stamp. Very early, however, it acquired the figurative sense of 
 a distinctive mental trait. In the seventeenth century it was used 
 to designate “the sum of the moral and mental qualities which 
 distinguish an individual or a race, viewed as a homogeneous 
 whole. 1 . By the eighteenth century it had acquired still another 
 meaning, viz.: “moral qualities strongly developed or strikingly 
 displayed/' or in terms of popular psychology, strength of will. 
 
 The earliest figurative meaning in English was the sense in 
 which it was taken by the first systematic attempt at a study of 
 character. “The Characters" of Theophrastus, the pupil of 
 Aristotle, is an attempt to describe a number of different types 
 of human beings singled out by some one distinctive mark. At 
 the same time, the attempt was made to pick out the other traits 
 that are associated with the distinctive character. 
 
 Thus the surly man is described as “one who, when asked 
 where so and so is, will say ‘Don’t bother me’; or, when spoken 
 to, will not reply.’’ 2 With this trait, Theophrastus associates va¬ 
 rious other attributes such as the fact that the surly man swears 
 at the stone which makes him stumble; that he will not wait long 
 for anyone; that he is apt not to pray to the gods, etc. 
 
 The plan was admirable, but the goal was not attained; and 
 in spite of various subsequent attempts it still remains an un¬ 
 discovered pole. The solution is to be found not by accidental 
 observation of an occasional association of traits nor by the de¬ 
 lineation of an imaginary type, but by an empirical study of 
 many individuals and of the frequency of association of traits 
 that have been analysed to their lowest terms. 
 
 1 Murray’s English Dictionary. 
 
 2 The Characters of Theophrastus, translated by Jebb and Sandys. Lon¬ 
 don, 1909, page 215. 
 
2 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 That certain elementary character traits form definite and 
 constant groupings is probably no mere metaphysical dream but 
 is rooted in the physical constitution of the individual. There 
 is indeed a possible biological foundation for a law of association 
 of character traits. Heymans and Wiersma 3 brought forward 
 some evidence to show that certain mental traits are hereditary. 
 A working-over of their data by two of Karl Pearson's students 4 
 has shown that these mental traits are hereditary in the same de¬ 
 gree in which physical traits are inherited. Now certain physical 
 traits are known to be closely associated. This has been shown 
 by Thomas Hunt Morgan and his students; 5 and they have at¬ 
 tributed this association of physical traits to the degree of close¬ 
 ness in which the actual physical determinants lie in the chromo¬ 
 somes. 
 
 So far as I know, the association of physical or mental traits 
 in man has not been adequately studied by empirical and statisti¬ 
 cal methods. There has been much charlatanism in this field— 
 especially in regard to the association of mental and physical 
 characters maintained by the Lombroso school. There has been, 
 too, a number of studies of correlation of one physical trait with 
 another such as length of arm and length of leg. The group of 
 characters that go with albinism: nystagmus, myopia, pink eye, 
 etc., are well known. But I know of no adequate study of the 
 association of groups of physical characters in man. 
 
 Our statistical information about the grouping of mental char¬ 
 acters is even more meagre. 6 And yet if the fundamental idea 
 suggested in early days by Theophrastus is true, such an associa¬ 
 tion should be capable of demonstration. Its value, if it could be 
 definitely established with anything approaching satisfactory com¬ 
 pleteness, would be inestimable. For if we could determine the 
 presence of the group of traits an individual presents on the 
 surface we could then infer the presence of another group less 
 
 3 Zeitschrift fur Psychologie, vol. 42, 43, 45, 51. 
 
 4 Elderton and Schuster. Biometrika, 1906-1907, V. 
 
 6 Cf. e.g. The Mechanism of Mendelian Inheritance. By Morgan et al. 
 
 c Joseph Kirk Folsom has made a preliminary attempt. Pedagogical Semi¬ 
 nary, XXIV, pp. 399-440. Dissertation, Columbia, 1917. Gives an excellent 
 bibliography. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 3 
 
 easily subject to observation. It is to be hoped that progress in 
 this line will not be long delayed. 
 
 Thorndike in the first volume of his Educational Psychology 
 has attempted a complete list of the original tendencies of human 
 nature. Various studies have been made of human traits. 7 These 
 may be regarded as studies of character from the point of view 
 of the seventeenth century definition of Character as the sum total 
 of the moral and mental qualities possessed by an individual. 
 The difficulty, with all of these studies, is that the original ten¬ 
 dencies such as aggressiveness, gregariousness, enthusiasm, etc., 
 have not yet been analyzed to their lowest elements and we do 
 not really know their precise psychological nature. 
 
 It is scarcely likely that we would get univocal definitions of 
 such terms as “aggressiveness,” “gregariousness,” “enthusiasm'’ 
 from all psychologists. Is the aggressiveness which makes a boy 
 walk around with a chip on his shoulder the same trait that makes 
 him attack an original problem in geometry with promptness, 
 vigor and zest? If so, is the labil condition of the nervous sys¬ 
 tem to all stimuli the essential and elementary character of ag¬ 
 gressiveness which leads to a sudden response, or is aggressive¬ 
 ness concerned more with the violence of the response, or the 
 excitement that assures its continuance until success is achieved 
 or failure recognized? Such traits need to be carefully investi¬ 
 gated and analyzed to their lowest terms or until they may be so 
 clearly recognized that they are detected with ease even when 
 masked by the circumstances in which they may be masquerading. 
 Until then, any studies made on the assumption of these as unit 
 characters are likely to suffer the fate of the early chemical 
 writings based on the supposition of four elements—earth, air, 
 fire, and water. Furthermore, the study of mere fragments of a 
 
 7 Cattell. Homo scientificus Americanus (1903). Science, N. S. XVII. 
 Pp. 561-570; Heymans and Wiersma. Zeitschrift fiir Psychologie. 1906 ff. 
 Vol. xlii, xliii, xlv, li; C. B. Davenport. The Trait Book, Eugenics Record 
 Office Bulletin, No. 6, 1912. Hock and Amsden. A Guide to the Descriptive 
 Study of the Personality. (N. Y.) State Hospital Bulletin, Nov. 1913; F. W. 
 Wells, The Systematic Observation of the Personality, Psychol. Rev., 1914, 
 xxi. Pp. 295-333. 
 
4 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 man’s life leaves much to be desired when we seek to understand 
 his behaviour as an individual. 
 
 Some character studies aim at classification as the main goal. 
 This has been a decided tendency among French authors. It is 
 an inheritance which has descended from Galen who gave us 
 the four character types: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phleg¬ 
 matic, which were supposed to be related to the four cardinal 
 body fluids: blood, yellow gall, mucus, and black gall. Any at¬ 
 tempt, however, to classify characters before the elements of 
 character have been adequately investigated, and the law of the 
 association of traits has been established is bound to lead to arti¬ 
 ficial and unsatisfactory results. 
 
 In recent times character has been studied from the psycho¬ 
 analytic point of view and psychiatrists have interested them¬ 
 selves in trying to investigate the wanderings and maskings of 
 the sex drive and the interpretation of the symbols of phantasy 
 as found in the writings of an author. The difficulty with these 
 studies is that they leave us in doubt as to how far they uncover 
 the analyser himself rather than the personality he investigates. 
 If someone else than the original dreamer gives his associations 
 with the figures and symbols of the dream and these are put to¬ 
 gether we find out what the dream means to him who gives the 
 associations. What it meant to the original dreamer must remain 
 a mystery. 
 
 If one confines himself to the interpretation of symbols, he is 
 likely to be misled. But if he looks for the expression of ideals 
 and yearnings, and correlates the writings of an author with the 
 facts of his life, he is more likely to analyse the writer than 
 merely to reveal himself. 
 
 Were it possible to bring the author into a clinic, and get his 
 associations with various passages in his works, much light 
 could be thrown on the meaning of poetry and the mechanism 
 of its productions, as well as the inner drives and mental mechan¬ 
 isms of the poet. This in general is impossible. But if one at¬ 
 tempts to take his own associations and not the author’s he is 
 very likely as we have said to analyze himself instead of the 
 poet. The lack of the personal associations of the author may in 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 5 
 
 some measure be supplied by the facts of his biography. The 
 more one studies poets and their lives the more one realizes that 
 their poetry is conditioned by the personal elements of their inner 
 experience. Their poetry is a cryptogram to which the biography 
 supplies the key. The two together reveal a human individual in 
 his innermost being. The biographies give us only the outer shell. 
 The poetry is writen in a code that only those can understand 
 who know the poet. 
 
 Studies based on analysis and historical investigation are not 
 purely psychoanalytical, for the neglect of the historical is the 
 radical sin of psychoanalysis. They may be termed literary- 
 historical. 
 
 This literary-historical method of character study is the one 
 that is here attempted. It is capable of revealing many things 
 about an author but it must be guided by a definite plan if it is 
 to lead to the understanding of an individual and his behavior. 
 The present study is the suggestion of a plan that may help to 
 this end and an illustration is given in an analysis of Shelley. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 The Analysis of Character 
 
 Mental traits are indefinitely numerous but not all are of equal 
 value in the understanding of a personality, at least in our pres¬ 
 ent ignorance of the laws of their combination. When, there¬ 
 fore, we would delineate a mental type we must pick out certain 
 special traits for study to give us the outline that we desire. 
 
 It is here that psychiatry comes to our assistance. It has long 
 been familiar with the extreme forms of behavior which indi¬ 
 viduals manifest under pathological conditions. 
 
 But many psychiatrists have failed to see that these extreme 
 forms of behavior are only exaggerated types of normal con¬ 
 duct, that the precox, the manic-depressive, the hysterical, the 
 psychasthenic, etc., are fundamentally modes of reation to the 
 difficulties of life dependent on so many types of character. Thus 
 Kraepelin regards Dementia precox in no sense of the word as a 
 mode of reaction which a certain type of character takes in the 
 presence of the difficulties of life but as a disease that may affect 
 any individual, whatever his mental make-up, provided he is so 
 unfortunate as to be subjected to the influence of a definite toxine. 
 This toxine he looks upon as produced in some manner by a dis¬ 
 ordered function of the sex glands. Thus the thyroid gland, when 
 stimulated to excessive secretion by pathological conditions, pro¬ 
 duces a rapid pulse, protruding eyes, a wasting of tissue, an ab¬ 
 normal fatiguability, an over prompt and violent emotional re¬ 
 action to extraordinary stimuli and incidents, all of which to¬ 
 gether give the peculiar physical and mental picture of Graves’ 
 disease. According to Kraepelin, Dementia precox is to the sex 
 glands what Graves’ disease is to the thyroid. And so with other 
 mental disorders, their specific form according to him is depen¬ 
 dent on some kind of pathological condition, and not due funda¬ 
 mentally and reductively to the type of character which the indi¬ 
 vidual possesses as an original endowment. 
 
 6 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 7 
 
 Even Jung who has such a profound insight into the psycho¬ 
 genic nature of Dementia precox, said of it: “Nevertheless the 
 mechanisms of Freud do not explain why there originates a 
 dementia praecox and not a hysteria; hence it must be postulated 
 that for dementia praecox there is a specific resultant manifesta¬ 
 tion of effects (toxins?) which causes the definite fixation of the 
 complex by injuring the sum total of psychic functions. How¬ 
 ever, the possibility cannot be disputed that the ‘intoxication' may 
 appear primarily from ‘somatic causes’ and seize the accidentally 
 remaining complex and change it pathologically.” 1 
 
 A very different view of the situation, however, is possible, 
 useful, and probable, if not yet satisfactorily and finally estab¬ 
 lished. The psychoneuroses and psychoses are only exaggerated 
 forms of normal trends. Dementia precox with its manifold 
 subforms, hysteria in its various manifestations, manic-depressive 
 insanity, psychasthenia, neurasthenia, are all manifestations of 
 character types. An individual becomes a precox, or a manic 
 depressive, not because he is infected by a toxine that comes from 
 without or is produced by the disordered functions of some endo¬ 
 crine gland; but because his character manifests certain types of 
 reaction under mental and physical stresses. It is because of the 
 various fundamental forms of human character that a disease 
 like Paresis, due to a definite toxine secreted in the brain by the 
 spirochete of syphilis, is so protean in its manifestations. The 
 mental picture in incipient Paresis may simulate any of the 
 known forms of mental disorders. This fact is to be explained 
 not certainly by the unity of the toxine; but by the diversity of 
 native human dispositions. 
 
 Every man, according to this view, has his characteristic 
 trend, precox, or manic-depressive, or hysterical, etc. When in 
 the pages to follow Shelley is termed a precox this does not 
 mean that he was so far deranged that he should have been con¬ 
 fined to an asylum; but only that his disposition in its main out¬ 
 lines resembles that of precox patients. 
 
 These “psychiatrical dispositions” are made up of elements. 
 
 1 The Psychology of Dementia Praecox. Eng. Trans. New York 1909, 
 P- 35 - 
 
8 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 The elements are not sensory nor intellectual; but they are rather 
 impulsive and emotional forms of mental adjustment to the en¬ 
 vironment. In a recent article 2 I have termed the normal mental 
 adjustments of an individual psychotaxes; and used the term 
 parataxes to designate abnormal or excessive psychic readjust¬ 
 ments. 
 
 The dominant psychotaxes of an individual are the most char¬ 
 acteristic elements in his personality. They tell us how he be¬ 
 haves in the difficulties and trials of life. They picture for us 
 his solution to the riddle of existence and that is after all what 
 is most worth while in any man’s life. The final character is the 
 resultant of behavior; and the dominant trends, which lead to this 
 resultant, are the psychotaxes. 
 
 These may be classified as follows: 
 
 I. Psychotaxes that present no solution for the mental conflict 
 which arises in any difficult situation. These are depression 
 and anxiety. In the article above referred to, I have indi¬ 
 cated how the words depression and anxiety refer not only 
 to emotions but also to impulsive drives. Thus, for instance, 
 some people are not only sad but have a tendency to remain 
 depressed and nurse their sorrow. Others again seem to 
 experience a positive drive to fret over painful situations. 
 They are common modes of reaction, but, as we shall see, 
 were not dominant in the character of Shelley. 
 
 II. Psychotaxes that present some solution for a difficult situa¬ 
 tion. 
 
 i. The defense reactions. E.g. trying to forget and keep 
 the whole affair out of mind. Retiring from the ivorld 
 and shutting oneself up in the castle of one’s mind. In¬ 
 capacitation either general, as in neurasthenia; or special 
 hysterical disabilities, such as, a functional paralysis, or 
 deafness, or convulsive seizures, etc. Avoiding the reali¬ 
 zation of personal blamie by a high sense of personal 
 righteousness, or accusing or suspecting others, or de¬ 
 veloping delusions of persecution. 
 
 2 Psychoanalytic Review. July 1921 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 9 
 
 2. The compensations and sublimations. 
 
 Compensation is the opening of channels of satisfaction 
 of a similar but not a higher nature than that which was 
 blocked and thwarted. If channels of a higher symbolic 
 nature are opened the reaction is termed a sublimation. 
 Compensations are sometimes trivial, such as, the 
 theatre, novel reading, physical exercise; or of major 
 character, such as, transfer of affection, appeal for sym¬ 
 pathy, etc. Religion and social work may be looked upon 
 as the main channels of sublimation. 
 
 Some sit down and think a situation over and see what can 
 and ought to be done and then set out to make the most of it. 
 This is a rational readjustment and not a psychotaxis; for the 
 psychotaxes are blind impulsive drives, involuntary, and depen¬ 
 dent to a large extent on native disposition. 
 
 To study out the modes of readjustment of an individual is 
 an essential step in analysing his behavior. They are manifested 
 in his hours of conflict. Find out what one does in these mo¬ 
 ments, and you will discover the main currents in his conscious 
 and sub-conscious life. 
 
 In many people some unpleasant emotional experience of child¬ 
 hood reverberates through their whole life. Sometimes they have 
 forgotten it; or, at least, are not aware of the relationship between 
 this early experience and their later behavior. Such an emotion¬ 
 al experience is termed a complex. It is a very important ele¬ 
 ment in understanding a person's behavior and should always be 
 searched for and, if in any way possible, detected. It is be¬ 
 trayed by those things towards which he manifests a strong 
 emotional reaction of hatred or disgust. It associates itself with 
 other elements of a kindred logical nature, or with which it has 
 been merely in contact in the individual’s early experience. In 
 Shelley as we shall see the dominating complex was the unpleas¬ 
 antness of his relation to his father, commenced in childhood, 
 deepened, and intensified in manhood. 
 
 Man, however, is more than a reflex machine. He has an in¬ 
 tellectual as well as an emotional and impulsive life. He, there¬ 
 fore, develops an intellectual plan of life, a theory of existence, 
 
10 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 a general viewpoint that shows him what he wants to get out of 
 life. 
 
 The following analysis of Shelley is presented as a kind of 
 schematic attempt to study a human character from the individu¬ 
 al’s life and writings. It commences with the plan of life the 
 ideal or group of ideals that shimmer on the outskirts of one’s 
 mental vision and determine the general trend of activity. The 
 plan of life is always present. It is of fundamental importance 
 in determining the general tone of character, but it has been 
 heretofore neglected in most analyses of the human personality. 
 
 Alfred Adler, however, in his work on “The Neurotic Consti¬ 
 tution" has recognized the importance of what he terms the 
 “imaginary goal of life" or the “accentuated fiction’’ or at times 
 the plan of life. In fact he recognizes in the neurotic a double 
 plan of life: one unconscious and not in accord with the estab¬ 
 lished principles of social morality and the other conscious and 
 sanctioned by ethics and society. If the two are harmonized, 
 normal behavior results; if the conscious plan meets with ship¬ 
 wreck, the unconscious carries the unfortunate individual away 
 from reality into the barren wastes of a psychosis. Shelley had 
 a conscious plan of life. It would be also possible to distinguish 
 a second plan with unconscious elements in his violent protest 
 against authority, law and order rooted unknown to himself in 
 the hatred of his father. Instead of so doing we have considered 
 the plan of life as composed of conscious elements only and the 
 unconscious factors which constitute what Adler would term the 
 “anti-fiction" have been taken up under the term of the complex. 
 
 The study, therefore, proceeds in the next place to a determina¬ 
 tion of the fundamental complex, a concept for the understand¬ 
 ing of whose importance we are indebted to Jung. The attempt 
 is then made to analyse the driving forces in Shelley’s life de¬ 
 termining not only his actions but also the plots of his poems. 
 His mental adjustments are studied in his hours of conflict, and 
 his ordinary compensations. Finally we come to what has often 
 constituted the sum total of a character study—the special mental 
 traits. These traits are not analyzed to their lowest terms—a 
 task that could only be accomplished by the study and comparison 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 ii 
 
 of many individuals. Such a comparative study alone could also 
 give us the law of association of mental traits—the value of 
 which we have already indicated. 
 
 It will be seen, however, that the plan of life, the complex, 
 the driving forces, the mental adjustments give us that which 
 is most valuable in the study of any character, namely, an in¬ 
 sight into a human being’s peculiar difficulties in life and his 
 contribution to the solution of the riddle of existence. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 Shelley’s Plan of Life 
 
 That a man should consciously or unconsciously have a plan 
 of life is an inherent mental necessity. He has capacities of en¬ 
 joyment both sensory and intellectual; and nature, nurture, and 
 opportunity develop these along various lines. From the very 
 multitude of his capacities and the manifold blocks to their un¬ 
 hampered realization arises the essential impossibility of satisfy¬ 
 ing them all, and so a conflict of desires is unavoidable. Out of 
 this conflict issues a consciously or unconsciously accepted plan 
 of life and to know this plan is very important in obtaining a 
 general view of any man's character. It is likely that types of 
 plans correspond to types of character. 
 
 Not only is the type of plan characteristic, but also the way 
 in which it is adopted. A rational and cold calculating consider¬ 
 ation of the future is one type. A blind emotional drive is an¬ 
 other. It is this latter that characterizes Shelley. His plan of 
 life was a reaction to difficulties experienced in childhood, and 
 not a mode of action adopted after the consideration of the pos¬ 
 sibilities life held out before him. Shelley's way is perhaps the 
 common way—but on this point there is, so far as I know, no 
 statistical evidence. 
 
 In the dedication to The Revolt of Islam he has outlined this 
 plan and indicated the influences which led to its adoption. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear friend, when first 
 The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass. 
 
 I do remember well the hour which burst 
 My spirit’s sleep. A fresh May-dawn it was, 
 
 When I walked forth upon the glittering grass, 
 
 And wept, I knew not why: until there rose 
 From the near schoolroom voices that, alas! 
 
 Were but the echo from a world of woes— 
 
 The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. 
 
 12 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 o 
 
 13 
 
 IV 
 
 And then I clasped my hands, and looked around; 
 
 But none was near to mock my streaming eyes, 
 
 Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground. 
 
 So, without shame, I spake:—“I will be wise, 
 
 And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies 
 
 Such power; for I grow weary to behold 
 The selfish and the strong still tyrannize 
 
 Without reproach or check.” I then controlled 
 My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold. 
 
 V 
 
 And from that hour did I with earnest thought 
 Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore; 
 
 Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught 
 I cared to learn—but from that secret store 
 Wrought linked armour for my soul, before 
 
 It might walk forth to war among mankind. 
 
 Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more 
 
 Within me; till there came upon my mind 
 A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined. 
 
 Analysing this passage into the elements of his plan of life we 
 find the following: 
 
 (1) I will be wise, but with a wisdom which comes from hid¬ 
 den stores of learning. I shall despise the wisdom of the tyrants 
 who teach me and seek knowledge by ways and means which they 
 will regard with horror. 
 
 What does he mean here by the forbidden mines of lore? Med- 
 win in his biography (p. 24) tells us how he took special delight 
 in reading the sixpence “blue books” with their “stories of 
 haunted castles, bandits, murderers.” This led him on to magic 
 and spiritism, and Rossetti tells us (Vol. I, p. xxxvi) “that he 
 'went in for’ ghosts and fiends with a real eye to business: he 
 studied the occult sciences, watched for spectres, conjured the 
 devil, and speculated on a visit to Africa for the purpose of 
 searching out the magic arcana which her dusky populations are 
 noted for.” Traces of this occult lore are to be found in his 
 writings and to it may be ascribed the character of Demogorgon 
 who occupies so prominent a place in Prometheus Unbound. 
 
14 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 Though in his childish ideas this occult lore held the first place, 
 in the actual realization of his plan it faded much in importance 
 and yielded to the second which became the dominant motif in 
 his life and writings. 
 
 (2) The second factor is not expressly brought out but is re¬ 
 ferred to in the words “For I grow weary to behold the selfish 
 and the strong still tyrannize without reproach or check/’ He 
 was not only weary of beholding it but there is abundant evidence 
 which we shall consider presently, that oppression was the funda¬ 
 mental complex of his life. It dominated his thoughts more than 
 anything else, leading to a tremendous over-compensation that 
 manifested itself in the rejection of authority and a delight in 
 shocking the sensibilities of all those who might be cast in the 
 stereotyped mould of social sanctions and customs. 
 
 (3) The third factor “I will be wise, and just, and free, and 
 mild if in me lies.” 
 
 Shelley undoubtedly built himself an ideal of a perfect man. 
 Byron said of him “He had formed to himself a beau ideal of all 
 that is fine, highminded, and noble, and he acted up to this ideal 
 even to the very letter.” 1 The last words, if true at all, mean 
 rather that he thought he did. In considering his conflict and 
 defense reactions we shall see that Shelley was one of those who 
 in his own estimation was like the king who can do no wrong. 
 His ideal, furthermore, was fashioned to suit his inner drives 
 and never resulted in any moral conflict or painful struggle to 
 maintain his standard of conduct. 
 
 The fragment on Prince Athanase portrays this ideal of a 
 perfect gentleman: 
 
 Not his the load of any secret crime, 
 
 For nought of ill his heart could understand. 
 
 • • f • • • • 
 
 ii 
 
 Not his the thirst for glory or command 
 Nor evil joys which fire the vulgar breast 
 For none than he a purer heart could have 
 
 1 Quoted by Rossetti, I, p. Ixxxv. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 15 
 
 Or that loved good more for itself alone. 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 His soul had wedded Wisdom and her dower 
 Is love and justice; clothed in which he sate 
 Apart from men, as in a lonely tower, 
 
 Pitying the tumult of their dark estate. 
 
 (4) In the last line of the quotation from The Revolt of Islam 
 Shelley speaks of “A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I 
 pined.” This thirst was the craving for the affection of one who 
 could understand. He tells us in the next stanza how he sought 
 this one in vain. He refers to his life with Harriet. 
 
 x\las that love should be a blight and snare 
 To those who seek all sympathies in one!— 
 
 Such once I sought in vain. Then black despair, 
 
 The shadow of a starless night, was thrown 
 Over the world in which I moved alone.” 
 
 He then tells how all were false to him till Mary came. 
 
 Yet never found I one not false to me, 
 
 Hard hearts and cold, like weights of icy stone 
 Which crushed and withered mine—that could not be 
 Aught but a lifeless clod, until revived by thee. 
 
 Wisdom and justice and the warfare against tyranny were not 
 enough to satisfy the romantic heart of Shelley. He must have 
 some one who could understand his aspirations and to whom he 
 could communicate his ideals. The search for this ideal woman 
 was the dominant positive driving force of his nature. 
 
 His poem Alastor is his autobiography describing a poet’s 
 search but failure to find the ideal woman that his nature craved. 
 The autobiographic character of the poem is expressly mentioned 
 in the apostrophe to the river on which Alastor sailed. 
 
 O stream, 
 
 Whose source is inaccessibly profound, 
 
 Whither do thy mysterious waters tend ? 
 
 Thou imagest my life. Thy darksome stillness, 
 
 Thy dazzling waves, thy loud and hollow gulfs, 
 
 Thy searchless fountain and invisible course, 
 
 Have each their type in me. 
 
i6 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 In the preface he says: “The poem entitled Alastor may be 
 considered as allegorical of one of the most interesting situa¬ 
 tions of the human mind. It represents a youth of uncorrupted 
 feelings and adventurous genius, led forth by an imagination in¬ 
 flamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent 
 and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe. He drinks 
 deep of the fountains of knowledge and is still insatiate. The 
 magnificence and beauty of the external world sinks profoundly 
 into the frame of his conceptions, and affords to their modifica¬ 
 tion a variety not to be exhausted. So long as it is possible for 
 his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, 
 he is joyous and tranquil and self-possessed. But the period ar¬ 
 rives when these objects cease to suffice. 2 His mind is at length 
 suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelli¬ 
 gence similar to himself. He images to himself the being whom 
 he loves. . . . He seeks in vain for a prototype of his concep¬ 
 tion. Blasted by his disappointment he descends to an untimely 
 grave.” 
 
 His pining away and dying of disappointed love was much 
 overdrawn, for the poem is to a large extent an unconscious ap¬ 
 peal for sympathy. It is indeed an expression of his libido drive, 
 but it is also an apology for his desertion of Harriet and his 
 gypsy life with Mary. If his very life depended on deserting 
 Harriet and living with Mary, then the world would perhaps look 
 more kindly on a deed which drove his true wife to suicide. 
 
 The poem describes an Arab maiden who, like the personalities 
 of a dream, is a composite photograph. She is Harriet for she 
 cannot understand; she brings him food from her father’s home 
 as Harriet brought him his sisters’ savings when his father ex¬ 
 pelled him from home. She is also an imaginary person whom 
 Shelley dreamed of as following him and watching him herself 
 unseen on the lake of Geneva. 3 And so the Arab maid “Watches 
 his nightly sleep, sleepless to gaze upon his lips parted in slumber.” 
 
 The Arab maid had no attraction for him. She was no poet. 
 
 2 He experiences the same inadequacy that Francis Thompson experienced 
 in his love of nature. 
 
 8 Cf. Rossetti on this imaginary personality—Memoir in the poetical Works, 
 1870. I, pp. lxxxii-lxxxiii. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 1 7 
 
 Like Harriet she could not understand. And so in his dream he 
 pictures to himself an ideal woman. 
 
 He dreamed a veiled maid 
 Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones. 
 
 Her voice was like the voice of his own soul 
 Heard in the calm of thought; its music long, 
 
 Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held 
 His inmost sense suspended in its web 
 Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues. 
 
 Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme, 
 
 And lofty hopes of divine liberty, 
 
 Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy, 
 
 Himself a poet. 
 
 Jfc sfc * * * * 
 
 Nor blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night 
 Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep, 
 
 Like a dark flood suspended in its course, 
 
 Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain. 
 
 Shelley outlines here his dominant ideal, wisdom and sensuous 
 beauty united in the one woman who understands him and ex¬ 
 presses his poetic ideals so perfectly that “her voice is like the 
 voice of his own soul heard in the calm of thought” and so 
 
 He eagerly pursues 
 
 Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade; 
 
 He overleaps the bounds. 
 
 He searches the lands, he traverses the seas, led by the fetish 
 of his love, 
 
 two eyes, 
 
 Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought, 
 
 And seemed with their serene and azure smiles 
 To beckon him. 
 
 And so he ever seeks, but finds not; and the starry eyes fade 
 to two lessening points of light gleaming through the darkness 
 and Alastor dies. 
 
i8 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 No sense, no motion, no divinity— 
 
 A fragile lute, on whose harmonious strings 
 
 The breath of heaven did wander—a bright stream 
 
 Once fed with many-voiced waves (a dream 
 
 Of youth which night and time have quenched for ever), 
 
 Still, dark, and dry, and unremembered now. 
 
 Here then is Shelley’s plan of life to know the charm of hidden 
 lore, live out the thoughts and actions of a prince’s high nobility, 
 to war against tyranny and to know one who understands him¬ 
 self, sees into his very soul and loves him with a sensuous love. 
 And then? After that there is nothing. 
 
 He will awake no more, oh never more! 
 
 Within the twilight chamber spreads apace 
 The shadow of white Death, and at the door 
 Invisible Corruption waits to trace 
 His extreme way to her dim dwelling-place. 
 
 Adonais VIII. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Factors in the Development of Shelley’s Plan of Life 
 
 In Shelley’s plan of life we find two elements: a drive and a 
 protest. The drive has in it two components, one affective and 
 the other intellectual. 
 
 The affective drive is for an object of sensuous love which 
 must at the same time be capable of understanding and harmon¬ 
 izing with his intellectual ideals. This I have termed above the 
 dominant positive driving force of his nature. It is rooted in 
 human nature and needs no other explanation than humanity it¬ 
 self. Humanum est amare. Love is an ineradicable impulse 
 of human nature and its presence is to be assumed and expected, 
 needing no cumbersome teaching of psychoanalysis for its demon¬ 
 stration. Its mode of satisfaction differs in various individuals. 
 It is, however, only one way in which an indivdual seeks an outlet 
 for the energy of his personality and it need not be aimed at the 
 sensual ideal that hovered before the mind of Shelley. 
 
 The intellectual drive took a form that was colored by the 
 protest. Shelley yearned to know, but the object of knowledge 
 must be forbidden lore. He had intellectual ideals, but they must 
 be such as would come in conflict with traditional concepts. Con¬ 
 flict, to him, was a greater desideratum than objective evidence. 
 Knowledge for its own sake was not a vigorous drive in the mind 
 of Shelley. He sought to know what the world disregarded. 
 This was in fact an element of his precox constitution. The 
 precox holds aloof from the common run. He has no desire to 
 be “in the swim,” but off in a little nook by himself. Thus Prince 
 Athanase wedded Wisdom 
 
 clothed in which he sate 
 Apart from men, as in a lonely tower, 
 
 Pitying the tumult of their dark estate. 
 
 And so Shelley lived in Italy rather than in England, his native 
 land; he studied Italian, Spanish, Greek, Arabic, not for prac- 
 
 19 
 
20 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 tical needs, but that he might live on in his lonely tower, unlike 
 the rest of mankind, pitying the strong activity of the common, 
 ordinary, ignorant rabble. At present I cannot refer the shut in 
 reaction type of the precox disposition to anything else than 
 native constitution. All minds have this type of reaction in a 
 greater or less degree, but in the precox, it manifests itself un¬ 
 checked and unbalanced and so he is very different from the hypo- 
 manic who frequents the street corners and the “movies.” 
 
 The love of that which the world merely disregards does not 
 by any means adequately describe Shelley’s intellectual ideal. He 
 loved knowledge upon which the sanctions of established opinion 
 frowns down with disapproval. He sought to develop ideals 
 and principles which would be subversive of all that is looked 
 upon as lawfully constituted authority. Why was this? It was 
 because of the negative element of his precox character, the pro¬ 
 test; and the explanation is to be sought in the origin of Shelley’s 
 insurrection against authority. 
 
 This dates back to childhood. Of the very early incidents of 
 Shelley’s life we have but little information. Helen Shelley’s 
 letters in Hogg’s Life give us a great wealth of anecdote. She 
 passes over in silence, however, the relations between Shelley and 
 his father. This may be because these relations were unpleasant. 
 By the time, however, that Shelley got to Eton there was evi¬ 
 dently no tender feeling of filial affection but an outspoken hate 
 and defiance. Rossetti tells us that “he was known among his 
 schoolfellows for a habit of ‘cursing his father and the king’ ” x 
 and that he bestowed upon his father such nicknames as “Old 
 Buck” and “Killjoy.” 
 
 Before his Eton days he had come into conflict with authority 
 and his school-mates at Sion House. Medwin, a cousin, one of 
 his biographers, was one of the older boys when Shelley came to 
 this school. Hogg says that he entered there at the age of ten. 
 Medwin points out that these days were so unhappy, that they 
 never spoke of them in after life. Shelley seems to have been 
 cruelly persecuted by the fagging of the older boys and to have 
 been misunderstood and mistreated by his masters. Medwin is 
 
 1 Memoir, p. xxviii. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 21 
 
 authority for the following amusing incident. He had to com¬ 
 pose two lines of Latin poetry on a storm, so he came to Medwin 
 for assistance. His older cousin pilfered from Ovid the fol¬ 
 lowing distich,— 
 
 Me miserum! quanti montes volvuntur aquarum! 
 
 Jam, jam tacturas sidera summa putes. 
 
 “When Shelley’s turn came to carry up his exercise, my eyes,” 
 says Medwin, “turned upon the Dominie. There was a peculiar 
 expression in his features, which, like the lightning before the 
 storm portended what was coming. The spectacles, generally 
 lifted above his dark and bushy brows, were lowered to their 
 proper position, and their lenses had no sooner caught the said 
 hexameter and pentameter than he said with a loud voice, laying 
 a sarcastic emphasis on every word, and suiting the action to the 
 word by boxes on each side of Shelley’s ears. Then came the 
 comment, “Jam, jam, —Pooh, pooh, boy! raspberry jam! Do 
 you think you are at your mother’s?” Here a burst of laughter 
 echoed through the listening benches. “Don’t you know that I 
 have a sovereign objection to those two monosyllables, with which 
 schoolboys cram their verses? Haven’t I told you so a hundred 
 times already? ‘Tacturos sidera celsa putes ’ 2 what, do the waves 
 on the coast of Sussex strike the stars, eh? . . . c celsa sidera’ 
 . . . who does not know that the stars are high? Where did 
 you find that epithet ? ... in your Gradus ad Parnassum, I sup¬ 
 pose. You will never mount so high”; (another box on the ears 
 which nearly felled him to the ground) . . . “putes! You may 
 think this very fine, but to me it is all balderdash, hyperbolical 
 stuff”; (another cuff) after which he tore up the verses and said 
 in a fury, “There, go now, sir, and see if you can’t write some¬ 
 thing better.” 
 
 It is worth noting, from the point of view of the Adlerian over¬ 
 compensation theory, that this child, only a little over ten, 3 re- 
 
 2 Medwin wrote from memory and misquoted the line. See note p. 22, 
 Forman’s edition of his Life of Shelley. Oxford, 1913. 
 
 3 He had been forced to commence his Latin studies, when only six, with 
 a clergyman in the neighborhood of his home. 
 
22 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 acted to this incident by excelling in Latin poetry while at school 
 and devoting his whole life to poetic compositions. 
 
 At the same time this and similar experiences made him despise 
 and hate authority. “Nothing that my tyrants knew or taught 
 I cared to learn.” “I will be wise and just and free and mild as 
 in me lies,” “for I grow weary to behold the selfish and the strong 
 still tyrannize without reproach or check.” His unsympathetic 
 father who placed him in Sion Hall, his domineering school 
 mates, his unjust, ignorant, and tyrannical masters, and all the 
 authority that they represented in Church or in State were in¬ 
 volved in the protest of his whole being against authority. So 
 that when he left Sion Hall and went to Eton he was already an 
 Atheist and cursed his father and the king. 
 
 At Eton, Shelley waged continual warfare against authority 
 but to a large extent by mere boyish pranks calculated to tease 
 and annoy his masters. According to Rossetti he was probably 
 expelled for some offense the nature of which is not known. 
 
 In 1810 he went to Oxford where he met Hogg. Here he 
 gave expression to his anti-religious views in a pamphlet, on 
 which his friend Hogg was collaborator, and which they pub¬ 
 lished anonymously under the title of The Necessity of Atheism . 
 He was expelled for refusing to deny the authorship of the 
 brochure. Hogg wrote a note of protest and on being interro¬ 
 gated and declining to reply was also expelled. 
 
 His father insisted that he should break off his friendship with 
 Hogg and on his refusal not only closed the doors of his home 
 to him but refused to give him a single penny of support. His 
 sisters aided him by saving up their pocket money and sending 
 it to him by Harriet Westbrook, a young girl whom he finally 
 fell in love with and married. His father ever afterwards re¬ 
 mained relentless and never gave his son an allowance until cir¬ 
 cumstances forced a legal settlement. 
 
 Shelley’s life exemplifies the eternal tragedy of tyranny and 
 rebellion—the blind unreasonableness of domineering and un¬ 
 sympathetic authority and the reaction of the oppressed by a 
 logically unjustifiable but psychologically explicable all-embrac¬ 
 ing revolt. Shelley’s father and his tactless, domineering masters 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 23 
 
 welded a pathological association in his mind between authority 
 and all that can be connected with it or that it stands for and the 
 unhappy experience of his childhood and youth. 
 
 Let those who deal with the minds of children learn a lesson 
 from the life of Shelley. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 Shelley’s Father Complex 
 
 The cardinal complex in Shelley’s life thus became the tyranny 
 of an irreconcilable father. Shelley gives expression to this com¬ 
 plex and revenges himself upon his father in The Cenci. He 
 himself appears in this tragedy as Giacomo who is endeavoring, 
 as Shelley did in reality, to seek a law by which he could force 
 his father to settle something upon him. Giacomo the first born 
 son, as Shelley himself was, complains (Act II, Scene ii, lines 
 10-13) that 
 
 The eldest son of a rich nobleman 
 
 Is heir to all his incapacities; 
 
 He has wide wants, and narrow powers. . . . 
 
 This is only a picture of Shelley himself at war with his father 
 and relentlessly cut off without a proper allowance. 
 
 When in a dream one pictures a person against whom the 
 dreamer has a grudge it is much overdrawn, and base emotions 
 and criminal acts are often imputed which have no basis in re¬ 
 ality and the dreamer knows that they have not. And so in 
 Shelley’s tragedy the old Count Franceso Cenci appears as a 
 monster of cruelty who celebrates the death of his sons with a 
 banquet, imprisons his daughter and finally rapes her. 
 
 But Shelley is not content with these dream accusations against 
 his father. He kills him; making his own daughter rise up 
 against him and plot his murder. 
 
 Unlike Oedippus Tyrannus, we do not find any of Shelley’s 
 personages marrying his mother. Shelley’s father complex is 
 therefore to be distinguished from the Oedipus complex of the 
 psychoanalysts. When incest appears in Shelley it is between 
 brother and sister not between son and mother. Shelley’s letters 
 to his mother or his reference to her in other letters are rather 
 cold. Once he boasts of the liberality of her opinions. But one 
 
 24 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 25 
 
 looks in vain for even the ordinary expressions of tender feelings 
 towards his mother. Shelley hated his father because of his 
 harshness. And this dates, as we have seen, from a rather early 
 age. The difficulties of childhood were but increased in later 
 years and his father was harsh and unrelenting after Shelley 
 was finally expelled from Oxford and later married a tavern 
 keeper’s daughter. It is this feud that dominated Shelley’s mind 
 in the composition of the Cenci. 
 
 It is his own father against whom he vents his spleen when he 
 writes: 
 
 He has cast Nature off which was his shield, 
 
 And nature casts him off, who is her shame; 
 
 And I spurn both. Is it a father’s throat 
 Which I will shake ? and say, “I ask not gold ; 
 
 I ask not happy years; nor memories 
 Of tranquil childhood; nor home-sheltered love; 
 
 Though all these hast thou torn from me, and more;— 
 
 But only my fair fame; only one hoard 
 Of peace, which I thought hidden from thy hate, 
 
 Under the penury heaped on me by thee.” 
 
 Ill, i, 286-295. 
 
 In this search for the manifestation of the father complex 
 of Shelley I have commenced with the Cenci, because Giacomo 
 in this drama gives us a key to the whole situation. Giacomo is 
 the first born son of a nobleman, so was Shelley. Giacomo had 
 wide wants and narrow powers, so had Shelley. Giacomo was at 
 war with his father, so was Shelley. Giacomo was cut off by 
 his father without a proper allowance, so was Shelley. It is 
 clearly evident that the relationship between Giacomo and the old 
 Count Cenci parallels that between Shelley and his father. Gia¬ 
 como therefore is Shelley and if that is true the old Count Cenci 
 is Shelley’s father. 
 
 If, now, we look at the characteristics of the Count we can 
 find them again in the old king who figures in The Revolt of 
 Islam though there is no Giacomo here to help in the identifica¬ 
 tion. 
 
 The old king in The Revolt of Islam just like Count Cenci 
 was utterly insensible to the sufferings of others. He was also 
 
26 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 insensitive to the debt of gratitude due to the kindness showered 
 on him by those who, after a triumphant revolt against his tyr¬ 
 anny, spared his life. For when his counter revolt brought him 
 again in power 
 
 The Tyrant passed, surrounded by the steel 
 Of hired assassins, through the public way, 
 
 Choked with his country’s dead,—his footsteps reel 
 On the fresh blood—he smiles. “Ay, now I feel 
 I am a King in truth!” he said; and took 
 
 His royal seat, and bade the torturing wheel 
 Be brought, and fire, and pincers, and the hook, 
 
 And scorpions, that his soul on its revenge might look. 
 
 X, viii. 
 
 This heartless old man is the same type of personality as Count 
 Cenci. He represents authority for he is king and in both re¬ 
 spects he is the replica of Shelley’s childhood picture of his father. 
 But this time instead of wreaking just vengeance on his tyranni¬ 
 cal, unfeeling father,—Shelley pictures how he would have suf¬ 
 fered and deserved sympathy had he fallen into his father’s 
 hands. When we consider the fictions mentioned below of 
 imaginary persecutions of Shelley by his father, and also the evi¬ 
 dence of his keen craving for sympathy, we shall have no trouble 
 in seeing that psychologically The Revolt of Islam is the same 
 dream as the Cenci—but with the tables turned. The turning of 
 the tables gains for Shelley his much craved sympathy. 
 
 There can be no doubt that Shelley himself is the hero of 
 the poem, persecuted by the king, as Giacomo was persecuted by 
 Count Cenci. 
 
 It is Shelley who dramatically throws himself into the hands 
 of the tyrant and cries to his minions: 
 
 “With me do what ye will. I am your foe!” 
 
 The light of such a joy as makes the stare 
 Of hungry snakes like living emeralds glow 
 Shone in a hundred eyes.—“Where, where 
 Is Laon? Haste! fly! drag him swiftly here! 
 
 We grant thy boon?”—“I put no trust in ye; 
 
 Swear by the Power ye dread”—“We swear, we swear!” 
 The stranger threw his vest back suddenly, 
 
 And smiled in gentle pride, and said “Lo! I am he!” 
 
 XI, xxv. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 27 
 
 Shelley’s father complex and his craving of unjust persecu¬ 
 tion, for the sake of sympathy, were the dominant psychological 
 features in the weaving of his dream of the Revolt of Islam. 
 
 By way of transition to the next poem in which his father 
 complex makes itself manifest, let us note the similarity between 
 the punishment of Laon in the earlier part of The Revolt of Islam 
 and the condition in which the hero is found at the opening of 
 Prometheus Unbound. 
 
 Laon was arrested without reason by the tyrant King and 
 bound to a rock overhanging the town below. 
 
 They bore me to a cavern in the hill 
 
 Beneath that column, and unbound me there. 
 
 And one did strip me stark; and one did fill 
 A vessel from the putrid pool; one bare 
 A lighted torch; and four with friendless care 
 Guided my steps the cavern-paths along. 
 
 Then up a steep and dark and narrow stair 
 We wound, until the fiery torches’ tongue 
 
 Amid the gushing day beamless and pallid hung. 
 
 They raised me to the platform of the pile, 
 
 That column’s dizzy height:—the grate of brass, 
 Through which they thrust me, open stood the while, 
 
 As to its ponderous and suspended mass, 
 
 With chains which eat into my flesh, alas! 
 
 With brazen links my naked limbs they bound: 
 
 The grate, as they departed to repass, 
 
 With horrid clangour fell, and the far sound 
 
 Of their retiring steps in the dense gloom was drowned. 
 
 Ill, xiii-xiv. 
 
 Th^ analogy with Prometheus is evident. Both Laon and 
 Prometheus are personifications of Shelley. 
 
 Later on Laon was liberated by an old hermit. It is interest¬ 
 ing to note that Dowden recognizes in this old man the physician, 
 Dr. Lind, the friend of Shelley’s boyhood, who occupied a place 
 in his affections that should have been that of his father. Dow¬ 
 den writes that Dr. Lind “lives in Shelley’s verse as the old 
 hermit who liberates Laon from the dizzy platform on which he 
 stood enchained until his brain reeled and maddened, who bears 
 
28 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 the youth to that curious chamber strewn with rarest sea-shells 
 and tapestried with moss, where the sage had gathered many a 
 wise tome, and tends him there until Laon’s withered brain is 
 soothed and healed.” 1 
 
 In the Prometheus Unbound we have another exemplification 
 of the analogy between the dream and the myth woven by the 
 poetical imagination of the author. Among the characteristic 
 attributes of the dream are its pictures of a wish fulfilment—the 
 attainment of something yearned for by the dreamer and the re¬ 
 lentless revenge wreaked on some one who has done him harm. 
 In perfect accord with this law of the dream, Shelley pictures 
 his final triumph over his own father who drove him from home 
 and was unrelenting and unmerciful to the end. 
 
 To understand this poem fully we must also appreciate another 
 law of the mind. Once an individual has crossed another in any¬ 
 thing of serious moment there is a tendency to hate not only him 
 but everything with which he is connected. A pathological as¬ 
 sociation is welded between the personality of him who injures 
 and everything for which he stands. Shelley's father stood for 
 authority; and so Shelley revolted against all that law holds 
 sacred. This revolt was accentuated by the harsh domination of 
 his teachers and the bullying of older boys in his school days. 
 Shelley, therefore, became a thorough anarchist and rose up 
 against the sanctioned customs of society, God, religion, law, and 
 order; and dreamed of the triumph of the aboriginal and un¬ 
 trammeled man. This dream is woven for us in his Prometheus 
 Unbound. 
 
 It is the same dream as The Cenci, but clothed in other sym¬ 
 bols. In The Cenci his father is portrayed as the base and un¬ 
 natural creature who rejoiced over the death of his sons and the 
 rape of his daughter. And so Shelley wreaks his vengeance upon 
 him by portraying him in such horrid form and then slaying 
 him by assassins hired by his daughter. Those familiar with the 
 psychoanalytic interpretation of the dream will not be surprised 
 at such an interpretation. The Cenci shows that unconsciously 
 
 1 Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1866, I, p. 33. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 29 
 
 Shelley would have liked to kill his father. This does not mean 
 that such a thought ever actually entered his conscious mind. 
 
 In the same way he revenges himself on his father in Pro¬ 
 metheus Unbound . But the father idea is here extended by the 
 law of pathological association. Shelley’s father here stands as 
 the representative of law, order, might, power, and creative 
 majesty in the person of Jupiter who is a travesty of God Al¬ 
 mighty. Just as Francesco Cenci is an overdrawn figure of an 
 unnatural father, so Jupiter is pictured as a harsh and unbending 
 tyrant, cruel, without sympathy, taking a fiendish delight in the 
 torture of one who would not bow to his authority, as Shelley 
 would not submit to parental discipline. 
 
 And so Prometheus in the opening words of the poem ad¬ 
 dresses the Almighty: 
 
 Monarch of Gods and Daemons, and all Spirits— 
 
 But One—who throng those bright and rolling worlds 
 Which Thou and I alone of living things 
 Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth 
 Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou 
 Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise, 
 
 And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts, 
 
 With fear and self-contempt and barren hope; 
 
 Whilst me, who am thy foe, eyeless in hate, 
 
 Hast thou made reign and triumph, to thy scorn, 
 
 O’er mine own misery and thy vain revenge. 
 
 Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours, 
 
 And moments aye divided by keen pangs 
 Till they seemed years, torture and solitude, 
 
 Scorn and despair—these are mine empire:— 
 
 More glorious far than that which thou surveyest 
 From thine unenvied throne, O Mighty God! 
 
 Such words as these refer to no mythological personage. They 
 are Shelley’s reaction to the theistic concept, determined, not by 
 reason, but by the emotional resonance of his father-complex. 
 
 Prometheus himself is a fusion of several concepts. Shelley 
 himself recognized in him a satanic element. 
 
 “The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prome¬ 
 theus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgment, a more 
 
30 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 poetical character than Satan because, in addition to courage, and 
 majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, 
 he is susceptible to being described as exempt from the taints of 
 ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandize¬ 
 ment.” 2 
 
 Prometheus is Satan in so far as he is rebellious against God. 
 But Shelley would idealize his Satanic majesty and remove all 
 hate and self-seeking. And so he makes him the soul of man 
 who alone in the world is capable of resisting in his moral life 
 the will of the Almighty. 
 
 In the third act Jupiter complains: 
 
 All else had been subdued to me; alone 
 The soul of Man, like unextinguished fire, 
 
 Yet burns towards heaven with fierce reproach, and doubt. 
 
 And so Prometheus is humanity idealized of whom Shelley 
 dreams as resisting God till God himself is finally overcome by 
 Demogorgon. 
 
 Who is Demogorgon? 
 
 Panthea thus describes him when the veil fell from before him 
 as he sat on his ebon throne: 
 
 I see a mighty Darkness 
 Filling the seat of power; and rays of gloom 
 Dart round, as light from the meridian sun, 
 Ungazed-upon and shapeless. Neither limb, 
 
 Nor form, nor outline yet we feel it is 
 A living Spirit. 
 
 Act II, Scene iv. 
 
 He is one who when asked who “fills the faint eyes with fall¬ 
 ing tears” and “leaves the peopled earth a solitude” answers with 
 satanic sarcasm, Merciful God. 
 
 In Murray’s English Dictionary we get the following account 
 of the word Demogorgon: “Name of a mysterious and terrible 
 infernal deity. First mentioned (so far as known) by the Schol- 
 
 2 Shelley’s Preface to Prometheus. H. B. Forman’s edition of the Works 
 of Shelley, II, p. 140. 
 
 3 P. 216, 4-6. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 3i 
 
 iast (Lactantius or Lutatius Placidus? c. 450) on Statius Theb . 
 IV. 516, as the name of the great nether deity invoked in magic 
 rites. Mentioned also by a scholiast on Lucan Pharsalia, VI, 
 742. Described in the Repertorium of Conrad de Mure (1273) 
 as the primordial God of ancient mythology; so in the Genea- 
 logia Deormn of Boccaccio. The latter appears to be the source 
 of the word in modern literature (Ariosto, Spenser, Milton, Shel¬ 
 ley, etc.)” 
 
 Shelley’s interest in magic while at Eton has already been de¬ 
 scribed. It was the reaction of his mind against authority and 
 the established religion, with which authority was associated. 
 And so in the dream of Prometheus he conjures spirits from the 
 dead and finally makes the demon of magic triumph over Divin¬ 
 ity. No revolution could be more complete than the revolution 
 of the universe in which Satan triumphs over God. It is this 
 dream that Shelley unfolds in Prometheus. 
 
 There is another element in the character of Prometheus. This 
 element is Shelley himself. Dream personalities are often com¬ 
 posite photographs. The dream is a kind of delusion of grandeur. 
 Shelley is the ideal man who triumphs by Satanic might over 
 the Almighty power which like all power in Shelley’s eyes was 
 inherently wicked. And so Prometheus and Demogorgon are 
 purified of the elements that are most objectionable in Shelley’s 
 conscious philosophy—that is hate and cruelty. This probably 
 means that Shelley finally conquered or outgrew his hate for his 
 father and forgave him the wrongs he did him. 
 
 Prometheus is the liberator of mankind from the thraldom of 
 theistic concepts and therefore in this dream the final result is 
 the triumph of Shelley’s ideals. 
 
 And so “thrones were kingless and men walked one with the 
 other even as spirits do”; and women were frank, beautiful and 
 kind, 
 
 gentle radiant forms, 
 
 From custom’s evil taint exempt and pure; 
 
 Speaking the wisdom once they could not think, 
 
 Looking emotions once they feared to feel, 
 
 And changed to all which once they dared not be. 
 
32 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 “Sceptres, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes of reasoned 
 wrong" were but “the ghosts of a no more remembered fame.” 
 
 Jupiter, the tyrant of the world, in whatever form he has been 
 worshiped by man, is known no more, his shrine is abandoned. 
 
 The loathsome mask has fallen. The man remains,— 
 Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man. 
 
 Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, 
 
 Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king 
 Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man. 
 
 Passionless? no:—yet free from guilt or pain. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 The Driving Forces in Shelley’s Life 
 
 The driving forces in Shelley’s life have been indicated in part 
 in the study of his plan of life. Thus we have shown on the 
 basis of his own self-analysis in Alastor that the dominant drive 
 was the craving for an ideal woman of sensual charm and the 
 intellectual ability to understand his poetical and philosophical 
 concepts. This ideal woman was never found. One of the ele¬ 
 ments of tragedy in his life was his tendency to idealize a woman 
 who attracted him. Thus he idealized his first wife, Harriet, 
 thinking that she was capable at least of being elevated to his 
 poetic sphere. When disillusioned and disappointed, he met 
 Mary Godwin, she was promptly idealized; and he forsook Har¬ 
 riet and went off to the continent with Mary. Mary had poetic 
 appreciation and some poetic ability, but even with her he was 
 not fully satisfied. 
 
 There are a number of things in his life and writings which in¬ 
 dicate that had Shelley lived, Mary might have gone the way 
 of Harriet. 
 
 Epipsychidion, written after his marriage with Mary, is a love 
 poem to an Italian girl. In that he expresses his principles on 
 the married life i 1 
 
 I never was attached to that great sect 
 Whose doctrine is that each one should select 
 Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, 
 
 And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend 
 To cold oblivion; though it is in the code 
 
 1 The lines here quoted occur also in an earlier draft of the poem which 
 according to Mrs. Shelley Was written before he met Emilia—though the 
 name Emily occurs towards the end of the preliminary fragment. The frag¬ 
 ment does not contain the invitation mentioned below to fly with him to his 
 Eden in the purple West and lacks the living intensity of the final production. 
 Cf. Note on lines connected with Epipsychidion. Cambridge. Edition of 
 Shelley. Boston, 1901. P. 436. 
 
 33 
 
34 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 Of modern morals, and the beaten road 
 Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread 
 Who travel to their home among the dead 
 By the broad highway of the world, and so 
 With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe, 
 
 . The dreariest and the longest journey go. 2 
 
 That a real conflict was actually brewing at this time is made 
 likely 
 
 a) by the fact that Shelley in this poem invites the Italian 
 girl to whom it was dedicated to fly with him to his far 
 Eden of the purple West. That there was some sting in 
 the invitation is evinced by the fact that Mary Shelley in 
 editing his poems appended explanatory notes to all the 
 longer poems with the solitary exception of Epipsychidion. 
 
 b) A poem to Edward Williams written in 1821 indicates a 
 feeling of discontent which seems to relate to his mar¬ 
 ried life with Mary. This is the same year in which 
 Shelley was idealizing Emilia Viviani to whom he dedi¬ 
 cated his Epipsychidion. He tells how the flowers have 
 told him that '‘She loves me not' 5 and complains sadly 
 that there was truth to the sad oracle and hopes that 
 
 there is a place of peace 
 
 Where my weak heart and all its throbs will cease. 
 
 c) In Ginevra he speaks of bridesmaids “envying the unen¬ 
 viable” and of marriage as 
 
 life’s great cheat—a thing 
 Bitter to taste, sweet in imagining. 3 
 
 The “eternal womanly” first in one form and then in another 
 was the main positive driving force in Shelley’s life. No woman 
 in particular but his dream of an ideal woman was the intellectual 
 source of the drive. 
 
 All his life long “two eyes, two starry eyes, hung in the gloom 
 of thought,” “seemed with their serene and azure smiles to 
 
 2 Lines 147-159. 
 
 3 Cf. Hereon Rossetti’s note. Poetical Works of Shelley, I, cxiv. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 35 
 
 beckon him,” and ‘‘obedient to the light that shone within his 
 soul, he went, pursuing.” But no earthly eyes when really 
 gazed upon ever satisfied his poetic soul. All that was human 
 crumbled into dust, but the drive remained and he sought, but 
 sought in vain. This drive was the source of endless discontent 
 and forced him to paint again and again in his poems the ideal 
 woman whom he had never met. 
 
 The negative driving force of his life also makes itself mani¬ 
 fest. This negative driving force is the protest against authority. 
 We have already seen how this was manifested in his poetical 
 works. It showed itself also in his political activities. He paid 
 a visit to Ireland and took up the cause of Catholic emancipation 
 because Ireland, downtrodden by existing authority, appealed to 
 the mechanisms of his character. Some of his prose works indi¬ 
 cate the same complex of revolt against the established order: 
 A Vindication of Natural Diet, a little book in which he urges 
 a reform of diet to strike at the root of the abuses of legislation: 
 A Refutation of Deism; A Proposal for Putting Reform to the 
 Vote; On a Future State, a fragment in which he argues against 
 immortality. 
 
 Closely akin to the craving for love is the yearning for sym¬ 
 pathy. This was developed in Shelley to a pathological degree. 
 
 The craving has various manifestations. It is in fact most re¬ 
 markable to see to what extent men, as well as women, will go 
 to obtain the sympathy of their fellow beings. How many a 
 little pain and ache is exaggerated or even fabricated that one 
 may see the gaze of a pair of loving anxious eyes and feel the 
 gentle stroking of a tender hand. Were Shelley’s illnesses af¬ 
 fected by the craving for sympathy? 
 
 In a letter to Miss Clairmont 4 Shelley speaks of a nervous 
 irritability caused by his pains—which “if not incessantly com¬ 
 bated by himself and soothed by others, would leave me nothing 
 but torment in life.” 
 
 The distinguished physician, Vacca, apparently found no or¬ 
 ganic disease in Shelley. It is quite likely, therefore, that much 
 
 4 Quoted in Dowden’s Life, Vol. II, p. 356. 
 
36 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 of Shelley’s illness was a functional overflow due to the craving 
 to be soothed. 
 
 Another form in which the craving for sympathy manifests 
 itself is to let others see how badly you are treated. In case, 
 however, one is not sufficiently wronged, or is only justly pun¬ 
 ished, the mere publication of the facts will not gain for him the 
 much craved sympathy. Under such circumstances the account 
 that the sufferer gives of his misfortunes is often a gross mis¬ 
 interpretation of the true facts in the case. It is likely, that the 
 misinterpretation is not a conscious lie, but merely a statement 
 colored by bias. Sometimes children, and even adults, do some¬ 
 thing to provoke retaliation that others may see how badly they 
 are treated. One child who was brought to the Johns Hopkins 
 Dispensary actually did himself what, if others had done to him, 
 would certainly have merited the sympathy of any passer by. 
 When provoked by the children with whom he was playing he 
 would run into the street and throw himself down in front of 
 a moving vehicle and cry out: “See what you have gone and 
 made me do.” This, however, is an extreme case. Most cravers 
 for sympathy instead of any such childish attempt to get what 
 they desire, content themselves with imaginary incidents in which 
 they are unjustly persecuted, if the real events of life do not 
 bring upon them anything that may be distorted into an unjust 
 persecution. And such was the case with Shelley. 
 
 Rosalind and Helen is a dream in which the dominant motif 
 is this childish craving for sympathy. 
 
 Rosalind’s husband left a will in which he untruly accused her 
 of being an adulteress and secretly holding that the Christian 
 creed was false; and, therefore, if she did not depart from her 
 home within three days, and if afterwards she ever sought to 
 see her children again they would be disinherited and all their 
 patrimony turned over to their next of kin “a sallow lawyer, 
 cruel and cold.” 
 
 This is merely an overdrawn picture of an incident in his own 
 life. Shelley deserted his wife and children. After his wife’s 
 suicide they remained in the custody of her father, John West¬ 
 brook. Mr. Westbrook attempted to gain possession of them by 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 37 
 
 filing a suit in the name of the children asking the Court of 
 Chancery to appoint a guardian. The bill of complaint main¬ 
 tained that the father of the children was not a proper person to 
 bring them up, because he deserted his wife to cohabit unlaw¬ 
 fully with another woman, derided the Christian religion, and 
 denied the existence of God. As the case proceeded, the ques¬ 
 tion narrowed down to Shelley’s opinions on marriage and the 
 family unit. The judge, Lord Eldon, finally decided that Shelley 
 not only maintained that there was no such thing as marriage, 
 but was also immoral in his conduct, and that, therefore, in view 
 of the principles he held, he was no proper guardian for his 
 children. 5 
 
 When the bald facts are presented they do not necessarily 
 secure sympathy for Shelley. But Rosalind is driven from her 
 home and children by a false accusation of adultery. Shelley was 
 truly accused of adultery. Rosalind was suspected merely of 
 secretly holding that Christianity was false. Shelley’s theologi¬ 
 cal opinions dropped out of the discussion, and the question nar¬ 
 rowed down to one of fact whether or not he was actually im¬ 
 moral. Anyone would sympathize with Rosalind, many would 
 be incensed at the conduct of Shelley. So Shelley dreamed of 
 Rosalind and no doubt thought that the same sympathy was due 
 him as should be given to Rosalind and so compensated himself 
 for the storm of criticism that his conduct brought down upon 
 him. 
 
 The second part of the poem merely continues the same motif. 
 Shelley is personified in Helen’s husband, Lionel, whom the 
 “ministers of misrule” seized upon 
 
 and bore 
 
 His chained limbs to a dreary tower 
 In the midst of a city vast and wide:— 
 
 For he, they said, from his mind had bent 
 Against their gods keen blasphemy. 
 
 And so Lionel was imprisoned for his religious convictions. 
 
 5 Cf. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Edw. Dowden. Vol. II, ch. iii. 
 
38 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 Soon, but too late, in penitence 
 Or fear, his foes released him thence. 
 
 I saw his thin and languid form, 
 
 As, leaning on the gaoler’s arm— 
 
 Whose hardened eyes grew moist the while 
 To meet his mute and faded smile. 
 
 Too late the deliverance came, for Lionel, owing to a disease 
 contracted in prison, finally wasted away and died. Poor Lionel! 
 Poor Shelley! No one ever imprisoned him but still it was 
 sweet to dream in childish fashion of how fast tears would gush 
 and fall from many who had not wept before, if they could but 
 see how Shelley suffered as Lionel. 
 
 This craving for sympathy not only appeared in his poetry, 
 but was so pathological that it manifested itself in delusions of 
 persecution. Rossetti relates the following incident: 
 
 “At the beginning of May, 1816, Shelley and Mary, with her 
 infant son William, born on the 24th of January, and Miss 
 Clairmont, again went abroad, reaching Paris on the 8th of the 
 month. The practical reason for the trip was probably the ob¬ 
 vious one—that they felt inclined for it: but Shelley somehow 
 conceived that there was a more abstruse reason—viz., that his 
 father and uncle . . . were laying a trap for him with the view 
 of locking him up, and that Mr. Williams, the agent of Mr. 
 Madocks of Tanyrallt, had come down to Bishopgate, and given 
 him warning of this plot, which the poet believed to be only one 
 out of many that his father had schemed for the same purpose. 
 That Shelley made such an allegation is certain from the testi¬ 
 mony of Mr. Peacock; and that the allegation was untrue is con¬ 
 vincingly represented on the same testimony.’' 6 
 
 Rossetti relates another incident which shows that Shelley so 
 strongly craved the sympathy due the martyr that he seems to 
 have fabricated another delusion. 
 
 “Somewhere about this time, Shelley (we are told) having 
 called at the Pisa Post-Office, an English officer in the Portuguese 
 service apostrophized him with the exclamation : ‘What! are you 
 that damned atheist Shelly?’ and, without more ado, struck him 
 
 e Memoir in the Poetical Works of Shelley, I, p. lxxxii. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 39 
 
 to the ground with a stick, stunning him at the moment. He was 
 a tall and powerful man. Shelley looked up his acquaintance, 
 Mr. Tighe, . . . ‘who lost no time in taking measures to obtain 
 satisfaction.’ The proficient in theism and blackguardism was 
 traced to the hotel of the Tre Donzelle, and thence to Genoa, 
 whither Mr. Tighe (and it is said Shelley also) followed him: 
 but he was never run down. This is another of the singular 
 stories told by Shelley, and discredited by most of his biogra¬ 
 phers: the inclination of my own mind would be to accept it, 
 were it not that I find Mr. Trelawny a decided disbeliever.” 7 
 
 It is much more easy to understand such an incident as a de¬ 
 lusion fabricated by his craving for sympathy for his being perse¬ 
 cuted—the same craving that manifests itself in Rosalind and 
 Helen —than it is to comprehend the psychology of the sudden 
 attack launched by an unknown officer at the mere hearing of 
 the name of Shelley. It really seems that there was an element 
 of the grandiose in this remarkable delusion. 
 
 7 Op. cit., p. cxxvi. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 Hours of Conflict 
 
 The characteristic modes of adjustment of a human being are 
 best seen in his hours of trial. It is then that his character re¬ 
 veals itself by spontaneous reactions that it is impossible to sup¬ 
 press. 
 
 The supreme trial of Shelley’s days was the disintegration of 
 his married life with Harriet. It was, however, a trial that did 
 not extend over a very long period. This, in itself, is a char¬ 
 acteristic trait. Some individuals are so restless under unhappi¬ 
 ness that by defense reactions and compensations they soon 
 escape from an intolerable situation and do not sink under it, 
 brooding over their calamity in a deep depression. Shelley was 
 one of these. Like all human beings he felt sorrow, but it was 
 a goad that stimulated him to avoid it. It brought his defense 
 reactions into activity; and, all unconsciously, his heart sent out 
 tentacles that grasped at whatever compensation might be in 
 reach. Shelley is thus separated from the depressive reaction 
 type—even though in Alastor he pictures himself as pining away 
 for grief. In his preface to this poem he thus speaks of his 
 ideal poet. 
 
 “He images to himself the Being whom he loves. . . , He 
 seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by dis¬ 
 appointment, he descends to an untimely grave/’ This is merely 
 an appeal for sympathy. He wants to picture himself as wasting 
 away for grief, because in such a state sympathy will be lavished 
 upon him. 
 
 During this crisis of his life Shelley gives no evidence of the 
 wasting depression he idealized for himself. Though he writes 
 to Hogg: “My friend you are happier than I. You have the 
 pleasures as well as the pains of sensibility. I have sunk into a 
 premature old age of exhaustion .” 1 These words are to be taken 
 
 1 Quoted from Edw. Dowden’s Life. London, 1886. Vol. I, pp. 408-9. 
 
 40 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 41 
 
 as an appeal for the sympathy of his friend rather than the ex¬ 
 pression of a fact. For, a little later, he tells us how he is active 
 with compensations involving more labor than any depressed 
 person wasting away with his sorrow could ever attempt. He is 
 studying Italian again, reading Beccaria though it involved forced 
 attention. A few months later he ventures to attempt to raise 
 three thousand pounds for Mr. Godwin. 2 Such activities as 
 these were incompatible with anything approaching a depression. 
 
 But that he really suffered cannot be doubted. The dominant 
 driving force of his nature was, as we have pointed out, the 
 yearning for an ideal woman who would combine sensual beauty 
 with intellectual powers capable of understanding him and his 
 poetic aspirations. Gradually he came to realize that Harriet 
 did not understand him and, what was more, she never could. 
 
 The dominant driving force of his nature had not led to his 
 marriage with her. She had never appeared before him as his 
 ideal woman uniting sensual charms with intellectual abilities. 
 He had been driven to his marriage by his father complex. She 
 seemed to him an unfortunate creature persecuted by her father 
 as he was by his; and so he rose up as her defender and delivered 
 her from tyranny and oppression by marrying her. It was one 
 of his many acts of protest against the domination of authority 
 whether justifiable or not. And when it was all over he tried to 
 elevate her to his poetic level and for a while she responded. But 
 after the birth of her first child she found in her babe another 
 outlet for her affections and took less kindly to her husband’s 
 ideals. She did not like to read poetry and “trouble the golden 
 gateway of the stars.” The practical problems of life absorbed 
 her attention. And so she appeared indifferent though her let¬ 
 ters to her friend, Mrs. Nugent, after the separation indicate 
 that this was not really the case. 3 Nevertheless Shelley felt that 
 she was cold and thus complains in his poem to Harriet written 
 in May, 1814. 
 
 2 Dowden, op. tit., p. 417. 
 
 3 Cf. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. by Roger Ingpen, London, 
 1914. Vol. II, Appendix I, Harriet Shelley’s Correspondence. 
 
42 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 O trust for once no erring guide! 
 
 Bid the remorseless feeling flee; 
 
 Tis malice, ’tis revenge, ’tis pride, 
 
 Tis anything but thee; 
 
 O deign a nobler pride to prove, 
 
 And pity if thou canst not love. 
 
 In Alastor he pictures the poet wasting away for grief because 
 he could not find his lady love. 
 
 Upon an ivied stone 
 
 Reclined his languid head, his limbs did rest, 
 
 Diffused and motionless, on the smooth brink 
 Of that obscurest chasm;—and thus he lay, 
 Surrendering to their final impulses 
 The hovering powers of life. 
 
 This is his apology for his desertion of Harriet. I sought my 
 lady love. Had I not found her I would have died. I had looked 
 for her in vain in Harriet, and was I to waste and die? She came 
 to me in Mary, one whose charms I felt, and who could under¬ 
 stand my soul. He said to his friend Peacock: “Everyone 
 knows that the partner of my life should be one who can feel 
 poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet is a noble animal but 
 but she can do neither.” 4 
 
 We see here nothing but the drive of the pleasure-pain prin¬ 
 ciple. “I wanted Mary and I was unhappy with Harriet” sums 
 up the whole situation. There is no trace of a moral conflict. 
 Nor at this period of his life was there any basis for such a con¬ 
 flict. Long ago he had done away with the possibility of any 
 such trouble in his life by his revolt against authority brought 
 on by the harsh experience of his childhood days and the unre¬ 
 lenting severity of his father. That revolt had extended itself 
 to everything that authority upholds and so had swept away the 
 ordinary moral ideals of the social order in which he lived. 
 Without moral ideals there can be no moral conflict. And so in 
 this period of his life as in all others of which we have any trace, 
 Shelley’s conflict was not between moral ideals that he was strug¬ 
 gling to maintain and his innate cravings for blind satisfaction; 
 
 4 Note p. 434-5, Vol. I of Dowden's Life. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 43 
 
 but between the drive to seek the satisfaction he desired and the 
 blocks that reality set in the way of its attainment. 
 
 A second time of conflict came when he heard of the suicide 
 of Harriet. This brought on essentially the same struggle but in 
 a new field. When the problem of the desertion of Harriet was 
 acute, he felt that he would have to justify himself in the forum 
 of his own conscience and also in public opinion. His excuse to 
 himself is given in Alastor: I should have died under the burden 
 had I tried to keep up my unhappy life away from the ideal wo¬ 
 man whom I loved. His excuse to his friends accentuated the 
 shortcomings of Harriet—a noble animal she was indeed, but 
 she could not rise to my lofty poetic and philosophical world. I 
 did my best to elevate her but she sank back to the low levels 
 from which I raised her. She simply could not understand 
 poetry and philosophy. And that after all was a conditio sine 
 qua non in any woman who was to be my wife. 
 
 When the news of Harriet’s suicide came to him, it precipitated 
 a severe conflict between the reproach of conscience and his ideal 
 of a perfect gentleman. The resolution of the conflict admitted 
 of no self-reproach. It excused him completely and so his high 
 opinion of himself was maintained. He remained the noble 
 Prince Athanase of his dreams. 
 
 That the conflict was very severe is abundantly proved. 
 
 “All authorities agree in testifying to the painful severity with 
 which the poet felt the shock, and the permanence of the im¬ 
 pression. Leigh Hunt says that Shelley never forgot it; it tore 
 him to pieces for a time, and he felt remorse at having brought 
 Harriet in the first instance into an atmosphere of thought and 
 life for which her strength of mind had not qualified her.” 5 
 
 I have looked in vain for any expression of sorrow by Shelley 
 that involved the recognition of the crime of his desertion. He 
 defends himself in this crisis against the realization of moral 
 guilt and against ideas that would cloud his present happy life 
 with Mary Godwin. His responsibility is referred to something 
 far in the past which after all was an act of magnanimity on his 
 part—a condescension which at most was an error of judgment 
 
 5 Rossetti, Memoir, p. xciii. 
 
44 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 He made a mistake, but that mistake came from his liberality. 
 He often boasts of this liberality in his heroes who reflect his own 
 personal ideals. He defends himself against a sense of guilt for 
 deserting his pregnant wife and little child and returning her to 
 the harshness of a father from whom he once delivered her. He 
 does not want to think that he is responsible for the two years 
 of misery that terminated in her suicide. He attributes all guilt 
 to her family in a letter to Mary Godwin. 
 
 “Hookham, Longdill, everyone, does me full justice; bears 
 testimony to the upright spirit and liberality of my conduct to 
 her. There is but one voice in condemnation of the detestable 
 Westbrooks. If they should dare to bring it before chancery, a 
 scene of such fearful horror would be unfolded as would cover 
 them with scorn and shame.” 6 
 
 This was the most serious conflict of his life. It was a conflict 
 between his self ideal and the realization of a crime that would 
 have dashed that glittering statue from its pedestal and revealed 
 himself to himself as he really was. 
 
 In Alastor he draws his ideal of a poet, which was only the 
 ideal he tried to impose upon himself, not by victory nor by moral 
 conquest, but by dreaming of what he should be and flattering 
 himself that in himself he realized his dream. 
 
 The fountains of divine philosophy 
 Fled not his thirsting lips: and all of great 
 Or good or lovely which the sacred past 
 In truth or fable consecrates he felt 
 And knew. 
 
 Again when in the fragment on Price Athanase he says 
 
 For none than he a purer heart could have, 
 
 Or that loved good more for itself alone; 
 
 Of naught in heaven or earth was he the slave. 
 
 he is depicting his ideal of himself. 
 
 When, therefore, Harriet’s suicide made him face the crime 
 of deserting his wife and imposing on her two years of a miser- 
 
 6 Letter 248 from The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Roger 
 lngpen, 1914. Vol. II, p. 534. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 45 
 
 able existence from which she sought relief in drowning, his de¬ 
 fense reactions cast a screen about this stain upon his pure heart 
 and noble mind and he says: 
 
 (1) “Everything tends to prove, however, that beyond the 
 shock of so hideous a catastrophe having fallen on a 
 human being once so nearly connected with me, there 
 would in any case have been little to regret.” 7 
 
 In plain words, Harriet after I deserted her descended so 
 low that she is not worth mourning. Some few months 
 later he spoke of her as a “frantic idiot.” 8 
 
 (2) Everyone, furthermore, bears testimony to my upright 
 spirit and my liberality of conduct. 
 
 (3) The persons really responsible for her suicide are the 
 members of her own family who treated her so cruelly. 
 
 (4) I am indeed in some measure to blame; not indeed for 
 a moral crime, but a mistake made possible by my gen¬ 
 erosity and nobility of mind. It was a wrong for me to 
 have taken pity on her and elevated her to my superior 
 sphere of thought and life. 
 
 This conflict reveals a characteristic trait and it is with this 
 that we are interested and not the merits of the case. There are 
 some people who see their faults in an exaggerated light. There 
 are others who cannot see them at all. Shelley belonged to the 
 latter class. 
 
 In the over compensation of his revolt against tyranny, he got 
 rid of the burdensome load of the ideals of conscience and kept 
 only their spangled coverings. He would be good in dreams but 
 not in reality. The mechanism of his defense reactions made 
 this possible and by shifting responsibility and fabricating dis¬ 
 honest excuses he maintained in the citadel of his mind his bar¬ 
 ren and empty poetic dreams. 
 
 Shelley is a type. He has many replicas of whom we might 
 say that the price of self-satisfaction spares them much pain, 
 but leaves them destitute of that true nobility of soul about which 
 
 7 Letter cited above. 
 
 8 Rossetti, p. xciv. It is generally conceded that before the separation 
 Harriet gave her husband no cause to complain of her conduct. 
 
46 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 they dream, but for which they are unwilling to enter into the 
 moral conflict by which alone it may be gained. 
 
 After all, by flying from the moral conflict, peace is not ob¬ 
 tained. Crime will out. The skeleton rattles his bones in the 
 closet. The defense reactions give way from time to time and 
 the soul is face to face with itself. And so it was with Shelley. 
 One of his most intimate friends 9 said that he never forgot the 
 suicide of Harriet. 
 
 9 Leigh Hunt. Cf. Rossetti, p. xciii. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 The Compensations of Shelley 
 
 Thus we see one of Shelley’s characteristic modes of reaction 
 in the difficulties of life. He defends himself against them. He 
 was at this time at least no brooder over ills. He could not bear 
 a painful situation. It stimulated him to action even though this 
 was a headlong retreat. He could not honestly face a situation 
 and pass true judgment on himself and take the blame that was 
 his due. His mind was utterly intolerant of self-accusation. He 
 had to be satisfied with himself and so his ideas and judgments 
 of himself were manipulated that he might still remain in his 
 own estimation the Prince Athanase who had no secret crime and 
 did not even understand aught of ill, but was just and innocent 
 and pure. 
 
 That he was so sensitive also to the feelings of others came 
 from his craving for sympathy. His activity in defending him¬ 
 self is rooted in this craving to have others take his viewpoint 
 and sympathize with him. This has also something to do with 
 his self-justification. If he himself cannot take his own point 
 of view who else can? If he cannot sympathize with his own 
 state will he not be blamed by others rather than pitied ? So the 
 first step in securing the good graces of others was to establish 
 himself securely in the citadel of his own self-estimation. In 
 this way Shelley got rid of anxiety and sorrow. 
 
 But what did he do for positive enjoyment? What were his 
 compensations? At Sion House his chief compensation was 
 friendship—to some extent with Medwin but mainly with a boy 
 about his own age to whom he wrote his essay on Friendship. 
 There seems to have been an element of homosexuality in this 
 compensation. '‘There was a delicacy and a simplicity in his 
 manners, inexpressibly attractive. . . . The tone of his voice was 
 so soft and winning, that every word pierced into my heart; and 
 their pathos was so deep, that in listening to him the tears have 
 
 47 
 
48 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 involuntarily gushed from my eyes. ... I remember we used to 
 walk the whole play-hours up and down by some moss-covered 
 palings, pouring out our hearts in youthful talk. We used to 
 speak of the ladies with whom we were in love, and I remember 
 that our usual practice was to confirm each other in the ever¬ 
 lasting fidelity, in which we bound ourselves towards them, and 
 towards each other. I recollect thinking my friend exquisitely 
 beautiful. Every night when we parted to go to bed, we kissed 
 each other like children, as we still were.” 1 
 
 His minor compensations at Sion House were cheap stories 
 and the imaginations that they stimulated. 
 
 At Eton, friendship again constituted his chief compensation. 
 
 “While at Eton he formed several sincere friendships; al¬ 
 though disliked by the masters and hated by his superiors in 
 age, he was adored by his equals. He was all passion—passion¬ 
 ate in his resistance to injury, passionate in his love. , . . 
 
 He became intimate also, at Eton, with a man whom he never 
 mentioned, except in terms of the tenderest respect. This was 
 Dr. Lind, a name well known among the professors of medical 
 science. ‘This man,’ he has often said, ‘is exactly what an old 
 man ought to be. Free, calm-spirited, full of benevolence, and 
 even of youthful ardour; his eye seemed to burn with super¬ 
 natural spirit beneath his brow, shaded by his venerable white 
 locks; he was tall, vigorous, and healthy in his body; tempered; 
 as it had ever been, by his amiable mind. I owe to that man far, 
 ah! far more than I owe to my father; he loved me, and I shall 
 never forget our long talks, where he breathed the spirit of the 
 kindest tolerance and the purest wisdom.” 2 
 
 The praise, love and fellowship in joy and sorrow that Shel¬ 
 ley at this period received from boys of his own age probably 
 stimulated that innate yearning for sympathy which ever after¬ 
 wards was an insatiable craving of his nature. 
 
 Dr. Lind he idealized and on him he fixated a boy's father- 
 love which had never before found a place of rest. These two 
 things made his unhappy life at Eton a burden that could be 
 
 1 Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Thomas Jefferson Hogg with an intro¬ 
 duction by Prof. Edw. Dowden, London, 1906. Ch. 1, pp. 29-30. 
 
 2 Hogg, op. cit., ch. 2, pp. 33-34. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 49 
 
 borne. 3 His minor compensations consisted in spiritualism and 
 chemistry, both being particularly charming, because forbidden; 
 and, therefore, offering an outlet for his spirit of revolt. Curs¬ 
 ing his father and the king and shocking the sensibilities of the 
 devout afforded him also an outlet for his lively temperament. 
 
 As far as one can gather from the account of Hogg, Shelley’s 
 days at Oxford seemed to have been happy, full of interest and 
 opportunity. His friendship with Hogg constituted his greatest 
 source of happiness and he had no great sorrow or disappoint¬ 
 ment for which it acted as a compensation. He was living out 
 his plan of life as far as possible under the circumstances. His 
 father-complex still dominated his intellectual life, which con¬ 
 tinued to be a protest against the established order though not so 
 bitter as when at Eton. Metaphysics, chemistry, in the sense of 
 alchemy, and poetry continued to amuse him. His metaphysics 
 finally led him as we have seen to the publication of a pamphlet 
 entitled The Necessity of Atheism. 
 
 He and Hogg as we have said were expelled from the uni¬ 
 versity because they declined to deny its authorship. His father 
 refused to receive him home unless he broke off completely with 
 Hogg, and so Shelley was thrown on the world. It was his first 
 serious contact with the trials of life and much compensation was 
 found in the friendship with Hogg. Then came the loving pity 
 of his sisters who saved up their pocket money and sent it to him 
 by Harriet Westbrook. 
 
 And now for the first time he felt the full charm of the fetish 
 of his love. 
 
 Whose eyes have I gazed fondly on, 
 
 And loved mankind the more? 
 
 Harriet! on thine:—thou wert my purer mind; 
 
 Thou wert the inspiration of my song. 4 
 
 3 Dr. Lind seems to have been a doubtful influence for good in the life of 
 Shelley. When asked who taught him to curse his father he answered, “My 
 grandfather, Sir Bysshe partly; but principally my friend Dr. Lind, at Eton.” 
 Hogg, op. cit., p. 91. “He used to go to tea with the meek and benevolent 
 physician at Eton; and after tea they used to curse King George the Third, 
 for the doctor had really been, or firmly believed that he had been, cruelly 
 wronged by that pious and domestic, but obstinate and impracticable mon¬ 
 arch.” Hogg, op. cit., p. 91. 
 
 4 To Harriet Shelley. Rossetti edition, Vol. I, p. 1. 
 
50 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 He was not destined, however, to find permanent satisfaction 
 in human love. The lustre of all human eyes faded and he ex¬ 
 perienced this first in the waning of his love for Harriet. The 
 lines written in November 1815 may perhaps refer to this death 
 of his love. 
 
 Thine eyes glowed in the glare 
 Of the moon's dying light. 
 
 As a fen-fire’s beam 
 On a sluggish stream 
 Gleams dimly, so the moon shone then; 
 
 And it yellowed the strings of thy tangled hair, 
 
 That shook in the wind of night. 
 
 The moon made thy lips pale, beloved; 
 
 The wind made thy bosom chill; 
 
 The night did shed 
 On thy dear head 
 Its frozen dew, and thou didst lie 
 Where the bitter breath of the naked sky 
 Might visit thee at will. 5 
 
 He sought compensation in intellectual pursuits, Italian, the 
 reading of Beccaria Dei delitti e pene, in writing to Hogg and re¬ 
 calling their happy days at Oxford. He sought out the compan¬ 
 ionship of his friends and when neither compensations nor his 
 usual defense mechanisms enabled him to forget, laudanum se¬ 
 cured for a moment the end which the mechanism of the mind 
 failed to attain. His strong drive to do all in his power to for¬ 
 get is pictured in an account given by Peacock of a visit to 
 Shelley during this period of his life. 
 
 ‘"His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered. He 
 caught up a bottle of laudanum, and said, T never part from 
 this.’ He added, T am always repeating to myself your lines 
 from Sophocles. 
 
 Man’s happiest lot is not to be; 
 
 And when we tread life's thorny steep 
 Most blest are they who earliest free 
 Descend to death’s eternal sleep. 6 
 
 5 Rossetti ed., II, pp. 148-149. 
 
 6 Quoted from Dowden, Vol. I, p. 433. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 5i 
 
 He had already met Mary Godwin and the conflict involving 
 the desertion of Harriet was going on within him. It lasted only 
 a few weeks. Soon the lure of Mary's dark eyes became the 
 dominating influence in his life and compensated him entirely 
 for the waning of his love for Harriet. 
 
 Upon my heart thy accents sweet 
 Of peace and pity fell, like dew 
 On flowers half dead; thy lips did meet 
 Mine tremblingly; thy dark eyes threw 
 Their soft persuasion on my brain, 
 
 Charming away its dreams of pain. 7 
 
 After deserting Harriet, his love for Mary so fully satisfied 
 him that he seemed for a time supremely happy. He lived out 
 his plan of life with one who understood him, better than any 
 other human being. He protested against tyranny of all sorts in 
 his poems. He enjoyed intellectual pursuits. He reveled in the 
 glories of nature, living out a poet's dream with nothing to do 
 but enjoy himself and write poetry. 
 
 Leigh Hunt thus describes his daily routine at this period: 
 
 “He rose early in the morning; walked and read before break¬ 
 fast ; took that meal sparingly; wrote and studied the greater part 
 of the morning; walked and read again; dined on vegetables (for 
 he took neither meat nor wine); conversed with his friends, to 
 whom his house was ever open; again walked out; and usually 
 finished with reading to his wife till ten o’clock when he went to 
 bed." 8 
 
 To this work he seems to have added at times regular visits to 
 the poor. 
 
 He had everything a poet could desire and still he was not 
 happy. We have already seen that at the time of his tragic 
 death the eyes of Mary were already becoming two lessening 
 points of light gleaming through the darkness. 
 
 In 1820 (about two years before his tragic death) he felt that 
 love itself was as mortal as man. 
 
 7 To Mary Woolstonecraft Godwin. Rossetti’s ed., II, p. 297. 
 
 8 Quoted by Rossetti. Memoir, p. xcvi. 
 
52 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 First our pleasures die, and then 
 
 Our hopes, and then our fears: and, when 
 
 These are dead, the debt is due, 
 
 Dust claims dust—and we die too. 
 
 All things that we love and cherish, 
 
 Like ourselves, must fade and perish. 
 
 Such is our rude mortal lot: 
 
 Love itself would, did they not. 9 
 
 He sought compensation then in his friendship for Edward 
 Williams. 
 
 When I return to my cold home, you ask 
 Why I am not as I have lately been? 
 
 You spoil me for the task 
 Of acting a forced part in life’s dull scene,— 
 
 Of wearing on my brow the idle mask 
 Of author, great or mean, 
 
 In the world’s carnival. I sought 
 Peace thus, and but in you I found it not. 
 
 Perhaps one element in Shelley’s final discontent was a homo¬ 
 sexual trend existing in childhood and dormant in his later life 
 but rendering impossible a complete fixation of his love on any 
 woman. 
 
 But at all events his poem entitled A Lament, written in 1821, 
 indicates that he had lived out his plan of life and found it want¬ 
 ing, that all compensation was crumbling and he had no longer 
 any hope for the future. 
 
 O World ! O life! O time! 
 
 On whose last steps I climb, 
 
 Trembling at that where I had stood before,— 
 
 When will return the glory of your prime? 
 
 No more—Oh never more! 
 
 Out of the day and night 
 A joy has taken flight: 
 
 Fresh Spring, and Summer, Autumn, and Winter hoar, 
 Move my faint heart with grief,—but with delight 
 No more, oh never more. 
 
 9 Death. Rossetti’s ed., Vol. II, p. 332. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 53 
 
 Such then were the compensations of Shelley. They were 
 found inadequate, before he was thirty, when the crumbling of 
 his plan of life left him at the edge of a desert of discontent 
 which perhaps he would never have been able to traverse. Hope, 
 at all events, was gone, some months before his death of which 
 he had a strange presentiment. 
 
 Lilies for a bridal bed, 
 
 Roses for a matron’s head, 
 
 Violets for a maiden dead; 
 
 Pansies let my flowers be; 
 
 On the living grave I bear 
 Scatter them without a tear, 
 
 Let no friend, however dear, 
 
 Waste a hope, a fear, for me. 10 
 
 10 Remembrance. Rossetti’s ed. II, p. 274. See in the Appendix, pp. 1002-3 
 of Ingpen’s ed. of his letters, the letter of transmission of this poem and the 
 one to Edw. Williams. They indicate that he was not less depressed when 
 out of his poetic moods than when in them. He wanted the poems kept 
 secret and that was probably because they revealed the hidden trend of dis¬ 
 content with which he was struggling. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Special Traits of Character 
 
 A number of special traits of character manifest themselves in 
 every individual. Each trait has no doubt a deep signification 
 though we do not know at present what this hidden meaning may 
 be. It is quite possible that several such traits must be at bottom 
 all one and the same thing, that is named differently when ap¬ 
 plied to diverse objects or manifests itself in different ways. 
 The study of character will not make great progress till the an¬ 
 alysis of these character traits has to some extent been accom¬ 
 plished. When that is done the problem of the linkage and as¬ 
 sociation of character traits may be undertaken with some hope 
 of a successful solution. As a preliminary step we may merely 
 enumerate, more or less in a haphazard fashion, the character 
 traits of the individuals whom we study. And so the following 
 traits of Shelley s character are presented without any attempt 
 at analysis. There has been no effort to make the list exhaustive. 
 
 Shelley's imagined type. I have attempted to determine Shel¬ 
 ley’s imaginal type by counting the images found in a few 
 samples of his poetry much in the same way as the pathologist 
 makes a differential count of the white blood corpuscles. For 
 this purpose I chose Alastor and the 6th Canto of The Revolt of 
 Islam beginning with the nineteenth stanza. Both selections re¬ 
 fer to similar situations. 
 
 I realize, however, that it is much more difficult to pick out 
 types of images than forms of leucocytes. My own images are 
 very poor and I had to read slowly to make the images come. 
 I may have missed many but think that the count has some rela¬ 
 tive value. Visual images are particularly hard to count exactly 
 and one must use his judgment in deciding whether successive 
 words are separate images or all part of one and the same picture. 
 I made three separate counts to see how they would agree. The 
 agreement indicates that the relative proportion in Shelley’s 
 
 54 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 55 
 
 imagery is not a matter of chance but is expressive of his typical 
 flow of thought. 
 
 
 Alastor 
 
 1st hundred 
 
 Alastor 
 
 2d hundred 
 
 The Revolt 
 of Islam 
 
 Total 
 
 % 
 
 Visual . 
 
 53 
 
 55 
 
 53 
 
 161 
 
 53 /d 
 
 Organic .... 
 
 18 
 
 17 
 
 1 7 
 
 52 
 
 i 7 l A 
 
 Auditory .. 
 Tactual & 
 
 15 
 
 17 
 
 15 
 
 47 
 
 i 5 /d 
 
 Temp. ... 
 
 6 
 
 4 
 
 10 
 
 20 
 
 6/d 
 
 Olfactory .. 
 
 4 
 
 5 
 
 3 
 
 12 
 
 4 
 
 Kinaesthetic. 
 
 4 
 
 2 
 
 1 
 
 7 
 
 2^ 
 
 Taste . 
 
 0 
 
 0 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 Jd 
 
 Total. 
 
 100 
 
 100 
 
 100 
 
 300 
 
 100 
 
 In the above list sight is underrated because of the difficulty 
 of counting the successive images in a complex. Touch is over¬ 
 rated because I have included under touch such phrases as: “to 
 meet her panting bosom/’ “folded his frame in her dissolving 
 arms,” etc. These pertain more properly to the organic. Shel¬ 
 ley seldom brings out the fine touch qualities such as soft, smooth, 
 rough, etc. When they do appear they are more often, in my 
 samples, of an unpleasant rather than a pleasant character. Had 
 doubtful cases been excluded, touch would have ranked below 
 smell. 
 
 On the other hand he was keenly sensitive to the organic, e.g. 
 gasping breath, shuddering limbs, tremulous sobs, breathless 
 kisses, thirsting lips, sinking heart, etc. 
 
 Shelley was but slightly sensitive to the pleasures of touch if 
 at all. Smell, however, is mentioned with distinct characteristics 
 and also temperature, e.g. icy caves. 
 
 Of taste he seems to have little appreciation. This perhaps 
 prepared the way for his becoming a sporadic vegetarian and a 
 total abstainer. Hogg says of him in his college days “he could 
 have lived on bread alone without repining” 1 and that though he 
 enjoyed sweets “he rarely sought for them or provided them for 
 himself.” 
 
 Beautiful images of sound and sight abound in his lines. But 
 his keenest joys seem to have come from vision. His descrip- 
 
 1 Life of Shelley, ch. 3, p. 86. 
 
56 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 tion of Cythna and the lady of Alastor’s dream are mainly in 
 terms of vision. Again and again he returns to the beauty of 
 the eyes. 
 
 Shelleys intellectual endowments . His biographers repeatedly 
 speak of his excellent memory. He learned so easily that it 
 was not necessary for him to work hard. He did not study 
 much at Sion Hall or at Eton; but at Oxford he became much 
 interested and Hogg tells us that he spent sixteen out of the 
 twenty-four hours in reading. He was a good classical stu¬ 
 dent. “A pocket edition of Plato, of Plutarch, of Euripides, 
 without interpretation or notes, or of the Septuagint, was his 
 ordinary companion; and he read the text straight forward for 
 hours, if not as readily as an English author, at least with as 
 much facility as French, Italian, or Spanish." 2 
 
 Shelley was no empiricist. He was the very opposite of Dar¬ 
 win and would have to be classed among the most deficient of 
 observers. 
 
 “He was able, like the many, to distinguish a violet from a 
 sunflower, and a cauliflower from a peony; but his botanical 
 knowledge was more limited than that of the least skillful of 
 common observers, for he was neglectful of flowers. He was 
 incapable of distinguishing the delicate distinctions of structure 
 which form the basis of the beautiful classification of modern 
 botanists." 3 In this respect Shelley resembled Francis Thomp¬ 
 son. 
 
 His interest in chemistry was not an empirical one but a weird 
 search for hidden lore, made all the more interesting, because 
 dabbling in fire and explosives was a forbidden sport. 
 
 In spite of Hogg, Shelley was not a philosopher. His attempts 
 at philosophy were fragmentary and dictated as we have seen by 
 emotional trends and hidden drives. 
 
 He played chess but was not a good hand at the game. 4 
 
 Shelleys emotional life is characterized by a remarkable fickle- 
 
 2 Hogg, p. 85. 
 
 3 Hogg, p. 75. 
 
 4 Rossetti, Memoir, p. cxxx. 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 57 
 
 ness in love. The fading of his love for Harriet and his sudden 
 infatuation with Mary and the waning of his love after only a few 
 years of married life is an evidence of this to say nothing of the 
 incident with Emilia. 
 
 He loved animals. He could not bear to see them cruelly 
 treated. He depicts this trait in himself in describing Alastor. 
 
 He would linger long 
 
 In lonesome vales, making the wild his home; 
 
 Until the doves and squarrels would partake 
 From his innocuous hand his bloodless food, 
 
 Lured by the gentle meaning of his looks. 
 
 He was fond of children, a trait which according to Hogg, 
 could be demonstrated by numerous examples. 
 
 Among his natural virtues was a spirit of generosity, so bound¬ 
 less and unreasonable, that it approached a vice. He gave money 
 when he could not afford it; gave it often when he was not 
 asked. This is only another example of how reason or cold cal¬ 
 culating motives had little influence on his conduct. His in¬ 
 hibitions were poorly developed; he acted on the spur of the mo¬ 
 ment, once knocking a man down who disagreed with him. 
 
 He wanted to be a reformer but he disliked politics. 
 
 “With how unconquerable an aversion do I shrink from po¬ 
 litical articles in newspapers and reviews! I have heard people 
 talk politics by the hour, and how I hated it and them! I went 
 with my father several times to the House of Commons, and 
 what creatures did I see there! What faces! what an expression 
 of countenance! what wretched beings !" 5 
 
 Associated with his hatred of politics was a tendency to shrink 
 from human society. Thus on Aug. 16, 1821, he wrote to his 
 wife: 
 
 “My greatest content would be to utterly desert human society. 
 I would retire with you and our child to a solitary island in the 
 seas, would build a boat and shut upon my retreat the flood 
 gates of the world.’' 6 
 
 5 Rossetti quoted from Hogg. Memoir, p. clvii. 
 
 6 Letters of Shelley, edited by Ingperi, 1914. Vol. II, p. 905. 
 
58 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 This was the precox trend in Shelley’s character which counter¬ 
 acted effectively his drive to reform the world and overthrow 
 authority. United with his natural gifts it made over the would 
 be anarchist into a poet who, instead of doing anything to work 
 a change in the order of things, merely dreamed of revolution 
 and revolt. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 The Shelley Profile 
 
 What then are the dominant traits that outline the character 
 of Shelley? What lines strike one most in his intellectual visage? 
 
 They are first of all the precox elements of negativism and de¬ 
 fense. 
 
 The bold, violent protest against all authority rooted uncon¬ 
 sciously in the hatred of his father. 
 
 The defense reaction of avoiding the realization of personal 
 blame. 
 
 The drive to retirement which made it impossible for him to 
 do anything practical towards carrying out his ideas of reform. 
 
 The craving for sympathy which lent his dominantly precox 
 disposition an hysterical tone. 
 
 His poetical rather than metaphysical or empirical mental en¬ 
 dowments. 
 
 His visual-organic-auditory type of imagery with its poverty 
 in the cruder elements of touch and taste, lending no doubt the 
 charm of refinement to his general disposition. 
 
 The fickleness of his love and the generosity of his soul. 
 
 These are the dominant traits that constitute the Shelley pro¬ 
 file and stand out prominently in his life and writings. 
 
 59 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 Evaluation of Shelley’s Plan of Life 
 
 If vve look at Shelley’s plan of life from the point of view of 
 a pragmatist we must conclude that in some way it was funda¬ 
 mentally inadequate. For a plan of life, to be successful, must 
 lead to peace and contentment usque ad finetn vitae . Shelley’s 
 mode of life did not attain this result. In fact it would seem 
 that when he died, having scarcely attained the age of thirty, 
 another crisis in his life was probably impending. At least there 
 were strong indications of a fundamental discontent. Nor can 
 we take the pessimistic view that all the world is discontented 
 and no plan of life can bring peace and happiness. 
 
 If one pays attention to the newspaper headlines, or the cases 
 that roll into a clinic, or that demand special attention in the con¬ 
 fessional, one is likely to get the impression that all the world 
 is miserable and discontented. But it is the extreme type of 
 case that makes the most noise in the world, the thousands of 
 happy ones afford no spicy items for the daily press. 
 
 In a questionnaire sent out by the Bureau of Social Hygiene 
 of New York City to a thousand married women, the following 
 report was given on the item of happiness. 1 
 
 Absolutely, Extremely, Entirely, Perfectly. 49 
 
 Happy. 822 
 
 Fairly, Rather, Not Wholly, Not Particularly. 28 
 
 Mixed, Intermittently, In General, etc. 37 
 
 Unhappy . 44 
 
 Special Cases . 8 
 
 Unanswered . 12 
 
 1000 
 
 It would seem from this investigation that there is no warrant 
 for the pessimistic view that happiness is not attainable. 
 
 If Shelley did not attain to a satisfactory solution of life it 
 was not because the problem is insoluble, but because there was 
 something wrong with his solution. 
 
 1 The Social Hygiene Bulletin, 1921, VIII, p. 11. 
 
 60 
 
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 
 
 61 
 
 If we look at his solution to discover what was lacking we find 
 one possible explanation in the fact that it was dominantly a blind 
 drive for self-satisfaction in an object of sensuous love. There 
 is no concept of the accomplishment of any task, the fulfilment 
 of a mission of value to anyone except himself. He sought peace 
 and contentment in human love and found it not, perhaps, be¬ 
 cause he always sought himself and never another. 
 
 True, you say, but did he not plan social reform and the bet¬ 
 terment of the race? Was he not, therefore, interested in the 
 welfare of others? 
 
 Had Shelley’s plans for reform been dictated by a pure desire 
 to help fallen humanity, they would have been a factor in his 
 life that might have changed him entirely and have enabled 
 him to live more than thirty years without experiencing the 
 grumblings of discontent. 
 
 But his ideas of reformation were dictated not by love, but by 
 hatred. They flowed from his father complex. He did not want 
 to build up, but to tear down. So that the love of mankind was 
 only incidental and the hatred of the institutions of authority in 
 general and of his own father in particular was the essential ele¬ 
 ment, not in a drive but in a protest. It is love that blesses and 
 not hate, a truth to which Shelley himself would have been the 
 first to subscribe. He did not, however, know himself and did not 
 realize that hate and not love dominated his plans of reform. 
 
 Had he been truly led by gentle charity his deeds of kindliness 
 would have been less sporadic. His actions would have been 
 dictated by an essential element in his plan of life and not by the 
 emotional appeal of an incident. Charity would have drawn him 
 out of his precox inner self. It would have led him forth to 
 action. He could never have been content, as he was, with 
 dreaming of reforms and giving expression to those dreams, not 
 in deeds, but in poems. 
 
 This is the radical sin of the precox; to dream much, but ac¬ 
 complish nothing. It was characteristic of Shelley’s life; and in 
 this he gives us an example, not to follow, but to avoid. 
 
 Shelley’s craving for sympathy made him dishonest with him¬ 
 self so that he could not see his own faults and so he was forced 
 
6 2 
 
 THOMAS VERNER MOORE 
 
 to justify his failings rather than to correct them. So intense at 
 times was this craving that it led to delusions of persecution, 
 fabrications without evidence. 
 
 Shelley's father-complex led to his protest and rebellion against 
 authority. It made him cast off the principles of the common 
 code of morals and so he was able to live as he pleased without 
 let or hindrance from the principles of morality. And still he did 
 not attain to happiness, for vanity of vanities and all is vanity, 
 and there is no consolation for the human heart, nor hope of 
 peace, nor place of rest, nor haven from the storm of life, except 
 in the bosom of the eternal principles of right and wrong, and in 
 the accomplishment of what is worth while in the sight of God 
 and man.