9. Love of Freedom, Love and Beauty. Freedom is the breath of Shelley’s works—freedom not only from the tyranny of earthly powers, but from the tyranny of religion, expressing itself in republicanism, in pseudo atheism, and in complete emancipation from the current moral code both in conduct and in writing.
Liberty, equality, and fraternity were ideals which presented themselves to him as objects capable of attainment, and he set himself with fervour to denounce the existing order of things and assail the barriers which checked the free development of the human spirit. Animated by the theories of William Godwin he attacked Government and religion, kings and priests, with an enthusiasm which inverted all traditional estimates of character and conduct. He regarded the dissemination of his theories as a sacred mission.
Shelley’s idea of love was Platonic. It did not ‘deal with flesh and blood’ “The doctrine of free love is inwrought by him with the other doctrine, adapted from Platonism, of ideal or intellectual love. His study of Dante’s Vita Nuova and Canzoniere, with their history of a rarefied and spiritualized love, also counted for much.” Shelley may be called a love-mystic, as Wordsworth may be called a nature- mystic. Shelley was always searching for ideal love. He conceives that love pervades the whole universe. The following lines illustrate his conception of love and beauty:
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere, (The Sensitive Plant)
For love and beauty and delight, There is no death nor change :
(The Sensitive Plant)
And the love which heals all strife.
(Lines written among the Euganean Hills)
That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst ;
Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form,-where art thou gone!
(Hymn to Intellectual Beauty)
And one sound beneath, ground
One sound beneath around, above, Was moving; ‘it was the soul of Love.’
(Prometheus Unbound)
Nothing in the world is single, All things by a law divine, In another’s being mingle.
(Love’s Philosophy)
The pursuit of the spirit of beauty and love dominates all his work. “He spent his life,” says Crump, “in the quest of a perfection which he sometimes called freedom, sometimes beauty, sometimes love– to Shelley the three were synonymous ; perfect liberty was impossible without perfect love, and perfect beauty was the outcome of these two. Liberty of man could be obtained only in a universe controlled by love.”
There are plenty of Shelley’s short lyrics, expressing the sentiment of love, tender, sometimes fanciful and sometimes full of unsatisfied craving, but always aspiring beyond the actual and sensual– always seeking for an ideal consummation of this sentiment. The different types and aspects of love contemplated by Shelley are summed up in the Epipsy chidion. He makes love the main principle in the universe, and pays his homage to it for its manifestation in beauty– and so love comes to be allied to beauty. Love is to Shelley a higher transcending principle, and so he often talks of self- effacement in connection with it, and of little direct personal relation with the object of love.
To Shelley the form assumed by the divine in man was love. He was always searching for love, Strains of delight in love and beauty, and of protest against a world where love and beauty are not fixed eternal forms, run through all the poetry of Shelley. The conception of love as the sole principle of freedom, joy, beauty, and harmony, in nature and in man appears in all Shelley’s poems. He is pre-eminently a poet of love.
Shelley’s devotion to liberty, and his whole-hearted belief in love as the prime factor in all human progress— these two dominate all his work. Liberty, in his eyes, was freedom from all external restraint. Love is to reign supreme, for only in an atmosphere of love can liberty efficiently work. Love is, with Shelley, a transcendental force, kindling all things into beauty. No poet felt more deeply the dynamic influence of love in moulding human destiny; none realized more utterly the insignificance of life devoid of love.
“Shelley and Keats were creators of beauty. Shelley’s vision is more metaphysical : beauty for him is ‘intellectual’, a spirit living and working through the universe and ultimately undistinguishable from the ‘love’ which ‘sustains’ it. The Keatsian vision of beauty, on the other hand, is predominantly a rapturous exaltation of the senses. Both the Shelleyan and the Keatsian visions of beauty are mirrored finally in the poetic instrument of expression, as Herford says.
“Shelley shared with Keats the perception of lovely form and colour and expressed it with magic utterance, but concrete beauty was not lovely to him, as it was to Keats, for its own sake. Where Keats gave a value to every detail of his landscapes, dwelling with particular emphasis upon each manifestation of earthly beauty which he saw, Shelley reduced his detail to a mere silhouette against a background of supernatural radiance or to indistinctness in a pervading atmosphere of dazzling light,” points out Hamilton Thompson.
