Shelley’s interest in Plato had existed since he was introduced to him as an hermetic and subversive text by Dr Lind at Eton. One of the most interesting facts about Shelley’s translation is that both he and Mary still regarded the text as controversial. The Symposium had the reputation of being improper to the point of indelicacy, and despite Thomas Taylor’s translation (1792) it was still academically suspect in the English universities. Plato was not included in the papers set for the Humanities at Oxford until 1847.48 Mary wrote privately to Mrs Gisborne that ‘Shelley translated the Symposium in ten days (an anecdote for Mr Bielby). It is a most beautiful piece of writing — I think you will be delighted with it — It is true that in many particulars it shocks our present manners, but no one can be a reader of the works of antiquity unless they can transport themselves from these to other times and judge not by our but by their morality.’49 It was not Plato’s idealism, but the homosexual undertone to the whole work which called forth this caveat. Shelley quite appreciated the force of this, and his ‘Discourse’ was mainly concerned with putting the matter into its historical perspective. He explained to Peacock that it was a ‘subject to be handled with that delicate caution which either I cannot or I will not practise in other matters, but which here I acknowledge to be necessary. Not that I have any serious thoughts of publishing either this discourse or the Symposium, at least till I return to England, when we may discuss the propriety of it.’50
The thought of Shelley discussing the propriety of a publication is surprising, and has led to some speculation that the subject of homosexuality was a particularly delicate one for Shelley himself. But Shelley’s estimate of publication difficulties was perfectly correct. Editorial caution on the part of Moxon and Leigh Hunt allowed only a mutilated version of each to be published in the official edition of Shelley’s prose in 1840, despite Mary’s struggle to retain a reasonably open text.[6] The mutilated version of both, with glaring omissions, continued in all editions into the present century,51 and was mistakenly used by psychologist-critics as prima facie evidence of Shelley’s ‘suppressed homosexuality’, the argument being that he could not face translating certain sections.52 As it is, the full text of Shelley’s ‘Discourse’ from his own manuscript, and the full text of The Banquet, from Mary’s own transcription of August 1818 first appeared in a limited scholars’ edition of 100 copies, printed ‘for private circulation’ in 1931.53
Shelley’s fascination with Plato influenced his work throughout his years in Italy, especially between 1818 and 1820. He also translated Plato’s Ion, part of his Phaedo, and several epigrams. It is a main element in the development of his thought, especially in politics, religious scepticism and that special mixture of moral and psychological speculation which Shelley called metaphysics. Yet Shelley was at no point completely converted to ‘Platonism’, any more than he had been previously to Godwinism. His attitude from the start was critical and comparative. He selected, disregarded and explored as he went: it is precisely that sense of the historical relativity of ideas and social values which Plato brought to Shelley, for which he is most important. The combination of logic and poetry in Plato especially delighted him, and led him to the comparison with Bacon’s essays. Yet even in the introductory ‘Discourse’, Shelley was always careful to define Plato’s virtues against a background of critical reservations. ‘[Plato’s] views into the nature of mind and existence are often obscure, only because they are profound; and though his theories respecting the government of the world, and the elementary laws of moral action, are not always correct, yet there is scarcely any of his treatise which do not, however stained by puerile sophisms, contain the most remarkable intuitions into all that can be the subject of the human mind . . . . The dialogue entitled The Banquet was selected by the translator as the most beautiful and the most perfect among all the works of Plato.’54 Moreover it is clear from Shelley’s subsequent remarks on Plato, that he approached the Symposium as much as a great piece of Greek poetry as as a piece of philosophic dogma. ‘Plato was essentially a poet,’ he wrote some three years later, ‘the truth and splendour of his imagery and the melody of his language is the most intense that it is possible to conceive. He rejected the harmony of the epic, dramatic and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include under determinate forms the varied pauses of his style.’55 The observation on prose rhythm is interesting, for the corresponding rhythm of Shelley’s translation is part of his most striking achievement, and distinguishes it from later versions.
Apart from its literary value, the main interest of Shelley’s translation and commentary on Plato derives from the broad and steady light which it throws on Shelley’s own theories and personal feelings about sexual love. There is no other text anywhere in his writing which shows these so clearly.
In the first place, Shelley examined the problem of homosexuality.
The passion which [the Greek] poets and philosophers described and felt seems inconsistent with this latter maxim [i.e. according to nature], in a degree inconceivable to the imagination of a modern European. But let us not exaggerate the matter. We are not exactly aware — and the laws of modern composition scarcely permit a modest writer to investigate the subject with philosophical accuracy, — what the action was by which the Greeks expressed this passion. I am persuaded that it was totally different from the ridiculous and disgusting conceptions which the vulgar have formed on the subject, at least except among the more debased and abandoned of mankind. It is impossible that a lover could usually have subjected the object of his attachment to so detestable a violation or have consented to associate his own remembrance in the beloved mind with images of pain and horror.56
Dismissing the direct physical expression of homosexual love — an ‘operose and diabolical machination’, as he graphically described the act of buggery — Shelley explains his own theory of ‘certain phenomena connected with sleep’, which has already been examined in relation to Alastor. He then developed his critique of Greek homosexuality as an index of an unjust and distorted society.
Probably there were innumerable instances among that exalted and refined people, in which never any circumstance happens [to] the lover and his beloved by which natural modesty was wronged. The lover appeased his physical instinct with his wife or his slave; or was engrossed in such lofty thoughts and feelings as admitted of no compromise between them and less intense emotions. Thus much is to be admitted, that represent this passion as you will, there is something totally irreconcileable in its cultivation to the beautiful order of social life, to an equal participation in which all human beings have an indefeasible claim, and from which half of the human race [i.e. the female half], by the Greek arrangement, were excluded. This invidious distinction of human kind, as a class of beings of intellectual nature, into two sexes, is a remnant of savage barbarism which we have less excuse than they for not having totally abolished.57
Through the issue of homosexuality, Shelley wished to direct his readers’ attention on to the specific limitations of Plato’s thought in particular, and Greek society in general, with respect to slaves and women. He regarded this Greek exploitation of slaves and women as mere property as the fundamental anachronism of their social and intellectual life. Referring to heterosexual love, he summarized:
The fact is, that the modern Europeans have in this circumstance, and in the abolition of slavery, made an improvement the most decisive in the regulation of human society; and all the virtue and the wisdom of the Periclean age arose under other institutions, in spite of the diminution which personal slavery and the inferiority of women, recognized by law and by opinion, must have produced in moral, political and metaphysical science . . . .58
Next, Shelley wished to compare this failure of the Greeks with what he regarded as an equal failure and distortion in modern European society.
The action by which this [homosexual] p
assion was expressed, taken in its grossest sense, is indeed sufficiently detestable. But a person must be blinded by superstition to conceive of it as more horrible than the usual intercourse endured by almost every youth of England with a diseased and insensible, prostitute. It cannot be more unnatural, for nothing defeats and violates nature, or the purposes for which the sexual instincts are supposed to have existed, than prostitution. Nor is it possible that the society into which the one plunges its victim should be more pernicious than the other.59
He defended the Greek erotic writing as compared with modern obscenity.
The ideas suggested by Catullus, Martial, Juvenal and Suetonius never occur among the Greeks; or even among those Romans, who, like Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, imitated them. The Romans were brutally obscene; the Greeks seem hardly capable of obscenity in a strict sense. How innocent is even the Lysistrata of Aristophanes compared with the infamous perversions of Catullus! The earlier dramatic English writers are often frightfully obscene, exceeding even the Romans. I should consider obscenity to consist in the capability of associating disgusting images with the act of the sexual instinct. Luxury produced for the Romans what the venereal disease did for the writers of James [1], and after the redeeming interval over which Milton presided the effects of both were united, under Charles II, to infect literature.60[7]
After this critical and historically comparative approach which Shelley urged towards Plato and Greek society, the ‘Discourse’ is finally focused on the moral, psychological and ideal nature of Love as the universal and dominant human passion. Here Shelley picked out certain favourite passages in the Symposium itself. Of the speeches, those of Pausanias (2nd), Aristophanes (4th), Agathon (5th) and Socrates (6th) touched him most closely.
From Pausanias he drew the distinction between Pandemic and Uranian love which frequently underlies much of his love poetry. The first is fleshly, promiscuous, temporal and concerned equally with young women and young boys. The second, Uranian love, is essentially masculine, deeply felt with the whole personality, both fleshly and spiritual, faithful over long periods and perhaps for life, and fundamentally improving and educative. According to the limited Greek system, Uranian love could only be held between two men, or a man and a youth of equal social status. It could not concern women or young boys, or slaves. The distinction between Pandemic and Uranian love was very important to Shelley, though he considered its homosexual and class interpretation as a characteristic piece of Greek barbarism. It was the matured, heterosexual and egalitarian form of Uranian love which Mary Shelley later referred to as ‘our sort of civilized love’ in the letter to Hunt. The two kinds of love are also referred to in Mary’s interpretative note on ‘Prince Athanase’. ‘The idea Shelley had formed of Prince Athanase was a good deal modelled on Alastor. In the first sketch of the poem, he named it Pandemos and Urania. Athanase seeks through the world the One whom he may love. He meets, in the ship in which he is embarked, a lady who appears to him to embody his ideal of love and beauty. But she proves to be Pandemos, or the earthly and unworthy Venus; who, after disappointing his cherished dreams and hopes, deserts him . . . . “On his death-bed, the lady who can really reply to his soul comes and kisses his lips.’ ”61 Urania, if she exists, is also a woman. This Platonic, or strictly speaking, Pausanian, interpretation also reflects a good deal on the structure of Shelley’s Epipsychidion, to be written two and a half years later, though it by no means explains the theme.
In translating Pausanias’s description of Uranian Aphrodite, Shelley made a notable adjustment and addition to the text, pointing it towards his own constant concern with the small, intimate and progressive community of friends:
And it is easy to distinguish those who especially exist under the influence of this power [Urania], by their choosing in early youth as the objects of their love those in whom the intellectual faculties have begun to develop: in preference to mere youths. For those who begin to love in this manner, seem to me to be preparing to pass their whole life together in a community of good and evil, and not ever lightly deceiving those who love them, to be faithless to their vows.62
The enigmatic and thoughtful phrase about the ‘community of good and evil’ is entirely Shelley’s own. He has also widened the application of the Greek, which clearly talks about ‘young boys in their green thoughtlessness’, in order to make the Uranian qualities of dedication and loyalty apply to both young men and young women.[8]
Aristophanes’s daring and comic parable of man’s dual nature — divided by the gods ‘as I have seen [hard-boiled] eggs cut with hairs’ — was Shelley’s second key text. He was fascinated by the psychological acuity of the Greek. Several concepts rapidly reinforced the lines along which Shelley’s thought had naturally been developing. There were the ideas of the divided self; the self in search of its tally (lispae) or double; and the fear of yet a further division within the psyche, ‘like those figures painted on the columns, divided through the middle of our nostrils’, which was the threat of insanity from the gods. But perhaps the greatest curiosity to him in Aristophanes’s speech was that of the third unnamed sex, the Hermaphrodite.
The androgynous sex, both in appearance and in name, was common both to male and female; its name alone remains, which labours under a reproach . . . the male was produced from the Sun, the female from the Earth; and that sex which participated in both sexes, from the Moon, by reason of the androgynous nature of the Moon.63
Shelley later saw a fine Greek copy of the Hermaphrodite in Rome, and explored both its psychological and poetic possibilities in later writing, especially ‘The Witch of Atlas’ and Epipsychidion.
Shelley left a special notation in a manuscript notebook, on the speech of Agathon, the young tragic poet of 31 in whose house the banquet was held. He wrote that it was a ‘wonderful description of love’, and marked the passages on the tenderness and delicacy of Love’s transit through ‘the souls and inmost natures of Gods and men’. He considered ‘Agathon a poem’, and later incorporated a section of his speech in Prometheus Unbound.64
But it was finally the sage Diotima’s philosophy, given in Socrates’s speech, which drew Shelley’s overwhelming interest. He marked six separate passages in his notebook, under the general heading of approval, ‘Diotima’s Atheism’.65 He was fascinated above all else by the argument between Diotima and Socrates which proves that Love cannot, after all, be a divine god. Love is, rather, a special intermediary force, in that strange daemonic level which exists between the known human world, and the perfect and for ever unknowable divine one. In this passage, Shelley found Plato penetrating directly into his own most private, inner obsession with the world of demons, which had always hovered uneasily in his mind between gothic metaphor and psychological reality. Given at length, it makes perhaps the finest example of Shelley’s translation skills, and the most suggestive indication of how one level of his creative writing was going to develop after leaving the Bagni di Lucca.
‘But’, [said Socrates], ‘Love is confessed by all to be a great God’. . . . ‘Do you not call those alone happy who possess all things that are beautiful and good?’ — ‘Certainly’ — ‘You have confessed that Love, through his desire for things beautiful and good, possesses not those materials of happiness’. — ‘Indeed such was my concession.’ — ‘But how can we conceive a God to be without the possession of what is beautiful and good?’ — ‘In no manner, I confess.’ — ‘Observe, then, that you do not consider Love to be a God.’ — ‘What then’, I said, ‘is Love a mortal?’ — ‘By no means.’ — ‘But what, then?’ — ‘Like those things which I have before instanced, he is neither mortal or immortal, but something intermediate.’ — ‘What is that, O Diotima?’ — ‘A great Daemon, Socrates; and every thing daemoniacal holds an intermediate place between what is divine and what is mortal.’
‘What is his power and nature?’ I enquired. — ‘He interprets and makes a communication between divine and human things, conveying the prayers and sacrifi
ces of men to the Gods, and communicating the commands and directions concerning the mode of worship most pleasing to them, from Gods to men . . . . Through him subsist all divination, and the science of sacred things as it relates to sacrifices, and expiations, and disenchantments, and prophecy, and magic. The divine nature cannot immediately communicate with what is human, but all that intercourse and converse which is conceded by the Gods to men, both whilst they sleep and when they wake, subsists through the intervention of Love; and he who is wise in the science of this intercourse is supremely happy, and participates in the daemoniacal nature; whilst he is who wise in any other science or art, remains a mere ordinary slave. These daemons are, indeed, many and various, and one of them is Love.66