Marketing Strategy Text and Cases 6th Edition Ferrell Solutions Manual
Marketing Strategy Text and Cases 6th Edition Ferrell Solutions Manual
Marketing Strategy Text and Cases 6th Edition Ferrell Solutions Manual
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21. the condition of affairs, directly consequent on Henry the Eighth’s
mere abrogation of the non-scriptural impediments to marriage.
Condemning strongly the excessive liberty of separation, which the
ecclesiastical tribunals had for generations afforded to society, they
were no less unanimous in condemning the doctrine of the absolute
indissolubility of wedlock. If it was wrong on the one hand to allow
husbands and wives the liberty of separating on frivolous pretexts,
and to provide the fortress of marriage with numerous gates of
egress, whose double locks obeyed the pass-keys of perjury and
corruption; it was on the other hand no less hurtful to society and
impious to God, to constrain a pair of human creatures, in the name
of religion, to persevere in an association, that could not accomplish
the highest purposes of matrimony, and debarred the ill-assorted
couple from the serene and wholesome pleasures of Christian life.
These were the views of the Anglican leaders; views that found
precise and memorable expression in the famous code of ordinances
(the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum) prepared for the
reformation of our ecclesiastical laws by Edward the Sixth’s thirty-
two commissioners for that purpose, who, doing away with the
minor divorce (a mensâ et thoro), decided that the divorce a vinculo
matrimonii should be the only kind of matrimonial severance known
to English law, and that it should be granted, (1) in cases of extreme
conjugal faithlessness; (2) in cases where a husband, not guilty of
deserting his wife, had been for several years absent from her, under
circumstances which justified her in concluding that he was dead;
(3) and in cases of such violent hatred as rendered it in the highest
degree improbable, that the husband and wife would survive their
animosities and again love one another; it being expressly directed
that this last provision should not be construed as affecting spouses
whose quarrels, though frequent and distressing, were neither
incessant nor in the highest degree vehement. Had Edward the Sixth
lived only a little longer these ordinances would have become the
law of the land;—law which, though suppressed on the accession of
Mary Tudor, would have been revived on the rise of Elizabeth, and
handed down to the present time.
22. Of course, the Anglican reformers conceived themselves to be
justified in disregarding the limitation, which our version of the
Scriptures assigns to liberty of divorce. Whilst some of them were of
opinion that this limitation was applicable only to the Jews, others
held that, if a wrong rendering of a particular word were replaced by
its true English equivalent, Scripture would be found to sanction the
dissolution of marriages, whose infelicity was due to nothing more
than some serious mental or moral disability. Of course, also, the
Commissioners’ recommendations were a compromise between the
requirements of bold reformers who wished for a much larger, and of
timid reformers, who would have preferred a smaller, measure of
freedom of divorce. Had Martin Bucer been on the Commission, as
he certainly would have been but for his recent death, it cannot be
questioned that the Commissioners would have ordained a far
greater liberty of dissolving unhappy marriages. It was Bucer’s
opinion (vide his Judgment touching Divorce, addressed to Edward
the Sixth) that every marriage should be dissolved in which the
husband and wife did not ‘love one another to the height of
dearness,’ or the husband could not rightly govern and cherish the
wife, or the wife was flagrantly disobedient and unprofitable to her
lord, or either party ‘defrauded the other of conjugal benevolence,’—
views which commended themselves so cordially to John Milton, that
he produced a new edition of Bucer’s tract, in the middle of the
seventeenth century.
Whilst showing how cordially he concurred in Martin Bucer’s
conclusions, John Milton’s four works on divorce—the Doctrine and
Discipline of Divorce, the Tetrachordon, the Colasterion, and the new
edition of Bucer’s Judgment touching Divorce—show also how far he
went beyond the sixteenth-century divine, in declaring every man’s
right to secede from an uncongenial partner, and to associate
himself with an acceptable helpmate. No libertine, for the
gratification of vile desire, ever demanded greater license of re-
marriage than Milton, in the name of religion, demanded for
Christian men, for their spiritual advantage.
23. The old canon law, which insisted on the indissolubility of true
marriages, and, even in cases of adultery, afforded no larger divorce
than the separation from board and bed, having been revived at the
close of Elizabeth’s reign, our ancestors lived for several generations
under a matrimonial law of unprecedented rigour and narrowness,
that in its results demonstrated the sagacity and prudence of Edward
the Sixth’s Commissioners. Had the Commissioners’ proposals
become law, England would have escaped much of the profligacy
that, after rendering her seventeenth century proverbial for domestic
libertinism, was less remarkable in the eighteenth century, only
because the usage of successive ages had rendered society
comparatively indifferent to it. Whilst no student of our social history
can question that throughout those centuries the English home
suffered severely from the excessive stringency of the matrimonial
law, every student of literature is cognizant of the stream of written
protests against the harshness and unyielding rigour of that law,
from Elizabeth to Victoria. That Milton shocked the lighter people of
his time by his assaults on the limitations of liberty of divorce is not
to be conceived. That he did not by his writings against those
restrictions offend the more precise and God-fearing of his
contemporaries, appears from the regard in which they held him as
a religious poet, after his descent to darkness and evil days. So far
as concerns freedom of divorce, the Free Contract party of William
Godwin’s epoch required nothing that Milton would not have
granted, and urged little that Bucer would have hesitated to
approve.
In 1813 (the year in which the anti-matrimonial note of Queen Mab
was written), Shelley regarded marriage with the eyes and by the
lights of eighteenth-century writers, who decried the institution as
the source of human misery and depravation. The evils, that caused
these writers to distinguish themselves in the long war against
wedlock, were no imaginary grievances. On the contrary, they were
evils which the Anglican reformers foresaw would result from a too
stringent marriage-law, and for which they wished to provide by
their proposals for divorce. They were evils crying aloud for remedy
24. throughout the country. Almost every parish of the land had a
miserably mated couple, whose union should have been terminated
by the law. For the mischief there was no remedy but the old
cumbrous and costly proceedings for obtaining the greater divorce,—
i.e. the suit in the first instance in the Ecclesiastical Court for the
minor divorce from board and bed, and the subsequent suit for the
parliamentary severance of the bond of marriage:—a process that,
making divorce the luxury of the rich, denied it altogether to the
poor. In the first thirty-seven years of the present century, only
seventy suitors (less than two a-year) obtained special parliamentary
enactments for their liberation from wretched wedlock. In the last
thirty-seven years of the previous century, such divorces were much
less frequent. The rich alone could afford to pay for the
parliamentary relief. For the poor, and for the people raised only a
few degrees above poverty, there was no divorce. Under these
circumstances, whilst almost every rural village had a Stephen
Blackpool, there necessarily arose vehement discontent not only with
the defective marriage-law, but with marriage itself. Nothing was
said against the obstacles to entering marriage; but everywhere an
outcry was heard against the impossibility of getting out of marriage.
Amongst the populace, social sentiment permitted a man in many
cases to be the physician of his own trouble, and after deserting his
lawful wife, to live with a woman who was not his wife. The general
grievance being the difficulty of escape from uncongenial wedlock,
the Radical writers dealt with this grievance, and usually forbore to
criticise the impediments to marriage, of which no large number of
people complained.
Taking his views from these writers, it was natural for the youthful
Shelley to think and write chiefly of the evils arising from the law,
which forbade a man to leave his wife and straightway attach
himself to another woman. In constructing the note to Queen Mab,
it was enough for him to put together, with no common smartness
and one or two original touches, the remarks of previous writers on
the troubles resulting from the permanence of matrimonial
obligations. Contemning marriage from his boyhood, after the
25. fashion of his teachers, he was eloquent about the difficulty of
escaping from it. Apart from a statement of the grand principle that
‘love was free,’ and that every person should be at liberty to marry
whomsoever he pleased, he does not seem to have troubled himself
about the divers impediments to the first entrance into the
unendurable bondage, before he went to Geneva. It was otherwise
on his return from the residence in Switzerland with Byron.
The startling discovery, that they were believed to be living in
incestuous intimacy with the same two women, caused each of the
poets to ponder the nature of the crime with which rumour charged
them. Stirring and fascinating Byron’s imagination, the scandal bore
fruit in Manfred and Cain. Stimulating and holding Shelley’s fancy, it
resulted in Laon and Cythna. It is interesting to observe how
differently the two poets dealt with the same repulsive subject. For
the timid sceptic and half-hearted innovator, who to the last was (as
Shelley put the case to his wife at Pisa) ‘little better than a Christian,’
it was enough to point to the crime in Manfred, as one of the
hideous possibilities of vicious desire,—as a monstrous and appalling
extravagance of wickedness, too hideous to be spoken of precisely;
as an offence so loathsome and revolting, that poetry could refer to
it only by vague hints and obscure suggestions. In Cain he could
refer with cynical mockery to times when, if Genesis were true,
brothers necessarily mated with their sisters, for the accomplishment
of the Creator’s purpose;—mockery, that was not so much a
palliation of the iniquity, as an assault on the credibility of the Book
which seemed to sanction the wickedness.
Shelley handled the subject in a very different way. It was natural for
the thorough and unwavering disbeliever, who had formerly denied
and still questioned the existence of the Deity, and no less natural
for the fervid political theorist, who regarded all human governments
and their subordinate institutions as the mere contrivances of
tyranny for the subjugation and debasement of the peoples, to come
to the conclusion that the impediments to matrimony had no other
foundation, and were in no degree more entitled to the respect of
26. reasonable men, than the impediments to escape from wedlock.
Absolutely ignorant of the social conditions from which the
hindrances to marriage had arisen, and no less ignorant of the
physical and social reasons for regarding most of them as conducive
to domestic purity, and some of them as needful for preserving the
human species from mental and bodily disease and deterioration,
Shelley was only carrying certain of his principles to certain of their
extreme logical conclusions, when he closed his consideration of the
impediments to marriage, by regarding them as so many capricious
and pernicious interferences with natural forces, which, if they were
left to take their own course, without let or hindrance from
presumptuous, and arrogant, and meddlesome mortals, would in
due course bring the whole human race under the dominion of
universal love;—a dominion under which all mankind for countless
ages would have enjoyed unqualified felicity, had it not been for the
disastrous activity of tyrants and priests.
It was not in Shelley to distinguish between the various
impediments, and discover grounds for deciding that some of them
should be retained, whilst others might be abolished. To Shelley, a
man’s right to marry his deceased wife’s sister was not more obvious
than a man’s right to marry his own sister. Regarded by the new
light, arising from the larger consideration of the matrimonial law, to
which he had been incited by the Genevese scandal, the artificial
hindrances to egress from matrimony were not more demoralizing
than the artificial hindrances to ingress into matrimony. For human
happiness marriage must be relieved of the impediments on its one
side, no less than of the hindrances on its other side. Love must be
restored to Freedom:—to freedom so perfect that a young man
would be free to marry his own sister, without the intervention of
priest or the control of lawyer; and after wearying of her be free to
marry her younger sister under circumstances in no way affecting his
freedom in the future. This discovery was the completion of Shelley’s
social philosophy in respect to the intercourse of the sexes;—the
philosophy that is, in the opinion of some of his admirers, a part of
27. his title to be regarded as a man, who, under auspicious
circumstances, ‘might have been the Saviour of the World!’
Having made this important discovery after his return from Geneva,
Shelley determined to communicate it to the world in a poem, which
should teach its readers that incest was nothing but an imaginary
sin; that ceasing to have the show of sin, on being rightly regarded,
it was seen to be compatible with the highest virtue; that it was one
of the great ‘multitude of artificial vices,’ to whose existence the
fewness of ‘real virtues’ was referable; that instead of being
loathsome, nauseous, hideous, unutterably repulsive and sinful, the
conjugal union of a brother and sister under the Free Contract was
permissible in the eyes of philosophic moralists, and compatible with
moral purity and the finest delicacy in the brother and sister; that
besides being altogether permissible, and in no degree
reprehensible, this conjugal union was a virtuous relation, in which
brothers and sisters would often stand towards one another in a
rightly-constituted society. To put this social doctrine before the
world, in the form most likely to commend it to the feelings of
youthful readers, and induce them to further every movement for a
state of things, in which brothers and sisters could so live together
without offending their neighbours, Shelley wrote Laon and Cythna:
or, The Revolution of the Golden City: a Vision of the Nineteenth
Century. In the Stanza of Spenser.
Brother and sister of the same parents, Laon and Cythna, the hero
and heroine of the poem, are beings endowed with all the virtues
conceivable in perfect human nature, and are still enjoying the
scenes of their childhood in Argolis, when they pass from the state
of mutual affection, that is desirable in a brother of some sixteen or
eighteen summers and a sister (ætat. 12), to a state of mutual love
that is desirable only between young people who can in the ordinary
course of things marry one another. What follows from this state of
things is indicated with consummate delicacy by the poet, too wary
and artful to shock his readers in the second canto by clear
disclosures, that might determine them to refrain from perusing any
28. later canto of a long poem. Laon and Cythna are suddenly torn
asunder by the agents of the tyrant, who figures in the poem as a
type of European monarchs in the nineteenth century, and soon
after their severance Cythna gives birth to the lovely child who owes
her life to Laon. In a later passage of the narrative, after he has
been released from the cage on the column’s top, and she, after
divers painful experiences, has been proclaimed the prophetess and
supreme directress of the revolutionists of the Golden City, Laon and
Cythna come together under circumstances, which prevent them
from recognizing one another in the first hour of their reunion. Laon
is still uncertain whether she is really his sister, or only bears a
strong resemblance to her, when he hears Cythna harangue the
Golden City revolutionists in these words:—
‘My brethren, we are free! the plains and mountains,
The grey sea shore, the forests and the fountains,
Are haunts of happiest dwellers;—man and woman,
Their common bondage burst, may freely borrow
From lawless love a solace for their sorrow;
For oft we still must weep, since we are human.
A stormy night’s serenest morrow,
Whose showers are pity’s gentle tears,
Whose clouds are smiles of those that die
Like infants without hopes or fears,
And whose beams are joys that lie
In blended hearts, now holds dominion;
The dawn of mind, which upwards on a pinion
Borne, swift as sun-rise, far illumines space,
And clasps this barren world in its own bright embrace!’
Fearful that the words ‘lawless love’ may frighten simple readers, Mr.
Buxton Forman (who thinks Shelley ‘might have been the Saviour of
the World’), in his most useful edition of Shelley’s works, appends to
the alarming words this note:—‘The words lawless love seem to be
used, not in a conventional sense, but merely to signify unshackled
love.’ True, but ‘unshackled’ from what? Cythna meant that tyrant
29. custom, or tyrant anybody else, having been overthrown and
rendered powerless for the moment, her brethren and sisters were
free to marry, and changing about to remarry, in perfect liberty of
affection—in love liberated from the shackles of human law—in
matrimony, no less easily entered than easily quitted—in marriage,
alike free from legal impediments to ingress, and from legal
impediments to egress—love, in fact, so perfectly free from the
supervision and control of human law, that it might be rightly styled
‘lawless love.’
Later in the poem’s story, when Cythna has rescued Laon from the
tyrant’s soldiers, and carried him off, on the ‘black Tartarian horse of
giant frame,’ to a picturesque ruin, the brother and sister, after
recognizing one another as whilom playmates in Argolis, pass
through emotions, that are set forth in the following stanzas:—
‘The autumnal winds, as if spell-bound, had made
A natural couch of leaves in that recess,
Which seasons none disturb, but in the shade
Of flowering parasites, did Spring love to dress
With their sweet blooms the wintry loneliness
Of those dead leaves, shedding their stars, whene’er
The wandering wind her nurslings might caress;
Whose intertwining fingers ever there,
Made music wild and soft that filled the listening air.
We know not where we go, or what sweet dream
May pilot us thro’ caverns strange and fair
Of far and pathless passion, while the stream
Of life, our bark doth on its whirlpools bear,
Spreading swift wings as sails to the dim air;
Nor should we seek to know, so the devotion
Of love and gentle thoughts be heard still there
Louder and louder from the utmost Ocean
Of universal life, attuning its commotion.
30. To the pure all things are pure! Oblivion wrapt
Our spirits, and the fearful overthrow
Of public hope was from our being snapt,
Tho’ linkèd years had bound it there; for now
A power, a thirst, a knowledge, which below
All thoughts, like light beyond the atmosphere,
Clothing its clouds with grace, doth ever flow,
Came on us, as we sate in silence there,
Beneath the golden stars of the clear azure air.
In silence which doth follow talk that causes
The baffled heart to speak with sighs and tears,
When wildering passion, swalloweth up the pauses
Of inexpressive speech:—the youthful years
Which we together past, their hopes and fears,
The common blood which ran within our frames,
That likeness of the features which endears
The thoughts expressed by them, our very names,
And all the wingèd hours which speechless memory claims
Had found a voice; ...
* * * * * * * *
The meteor shewed the leaves on which we sate,
And Cythna’s glowing arms, and the thick ties
Of her soft hair which bent with gathered weight
My neck near hers, her dark and deepening eyes,
Which, as twin phantoms of one star that lies
O’er a dim well, move, though the star reposes,
Swam in our mute and liquid ecstasies,
Her marble brow, and eager lips, like roses,
With their own fragrance pale, which Spring but half
uncloses.
The meteor to its far morass returned:
The beating of our veins one interval
Made still; and then I felt the blood that burned
31. Within her frame, mingle with mine, and fall
Around my heart like fire; and over all
A mist was spread, the sickness of a deep
And speechless swoon of joy, as might befall
Two disunited spirits when they leap
In union from this earth’s obscure and fading sleep.
Was it one moment that confounded thus
All thought, all sense, all feeling, into one
Unutterable power, which shielded us
Even from our own cold looks, when we had gone
Into a wide and wild oblivion
Of tumult and of tenderness? or now
Had ages, such as make the moon and sun,
The seasons, and mankind their changes know,
Left fear and time unfelt by us alone below?
I know not. What are kisses whose fire clasps
The failing heart in languishment, or limb
Twined within limb? or the quick dying gasps
Of the life meeting, when the faint eyes swim
Thro’ tears of a wide mist boundless and dim,
In one caress? What is the strong controul
Which leads the heart that dizzy steep to climb,
Where far over the world those vapours roll
Which blend two restless frames in one reposing soul?
It is the shadow which doth float unseen,
But not unfelt, o’er blind mortality,
Whose divine darkness fled not, from that green
And lone recess, where lapt in peace did lie
Our linkèd frames; till, from the changing sky,
That night and still another day had fled;
And then I saw and felt. The moon was high,
The clouds, as of coming storm, were spread
Under its orb,—loud winds were gathering overhead.
32. Cythna’s sweet lips seemed lurid in the moon,
Her fairest limbs with the night wind were chill,
And her dark tresses were all loosely strewn
O’er her pale bosom:—all within was still,
And the sweet peace of joy did almost fill
The depth of her unfathomable look:—
And we sate calmly, though that rocky hill,
The waves contending in its caverns strook,
For they foreknew the storm, and the grey ruin shook.
There we unheeding sate, in the communion
Of interchangèd vows, which, with a rite
Of faith most sweet and sacred, stamped our union.—
Few were the living hearts which could unite
Like ours, or celebrate a bridal night
With such close sympathies, for to each other
Had high and solemn hopes, the gentle might
Of earliest love, and all the thoughts which smother
Cold Evil’s power, now linked a sister and a brother.’
At the poem’s close, in reward for all their good deeds in a naughty
world, and all their pains of self-sacrifice for the promotion of human
happiness, this brother and sister (after death), together with the
charming child, who is the issue of their incestuous embraces, are
permitted to enter the boat of hollow pearl, in which they are carried
to the islands of the blest, to repose in everlasting felicity near ‘The
Temple of the Spirit.’
Lest it should be said that I misrepresent the story in a particular,
which, though important, affects in no way the poem’s principal
doctrine, let it be observed that to some readers this charming child
appears to have been the tyrant’s daughter, instead of Laon’s
offspring. Sir John Taylor Coleridge’s memorable article in the
Quarterly Review shows that, whilst recognizing with repugnance,
the incest of Laon’s intercourse with his sister, he regarded the child
33. as the issue of the despot’s passion. But on this point I conceive the
reviewer to have erred through the mystifications and ambiguities of
the narrative. To me it is clear that Shelley meant to intimate to
careful readers of the monstrous story, that Cythna’s child was
Laon’s daughter. The question, however, does not touch the poem’s
main purpose, as offspring would be the natural sequence of the
endearments interchanged by the brother and sister in the
picturesque ruin.
The two actors of the poem, in whom it is sought to interest the
reader most strongly, and for whose stainless purity and unqualified
goodness the author solicits our admiration, are a brother and sister,
whose embraces result in the birth of a little girl, no less lovely in
person and mind than her parents. The main purpose of the poem,
which has numerous subordinate and minor objects, is to plant the
incestuous pair in the reader’s affection, and lure him into regarding
so exemplary an instance of conjugal affection with sympathy and
approval. By some of the less daring of the Shelleyan zealots it has
indeed been urged that Laon and Cythna should be regarded as a
mere poetic ‘vision’ (as it is described on the title-page), and the
pure outgrowth of exuberant fancy, and not as a serious contribution
to social philosophy, intended to influence the judgment and conduct
of its readers. To this plea a sufficient answer is found in the pains
taken by Shelley to provide the work with a carefully worded prose
preface, in which he intimated, that the poem was addressed to
persons thirsting ‘for a happier condition of moral and political
society;’ that the hurtful institutions and principles assailed in the
poem were the hurtful institutions and principles then dominant in
European society, and especially of English society; that the
doctrines of the poem were offered for the solution of the various
religious problems, political problems, and economical problems,
then holding the attention and troubling the minds of earnest
philanthropists; that, notwithstanding its artistic form and beauty,
the poem was offered as a serious contribution to political and social
philosophy, and had been written with a view to practical results in
human conduct.
34. By others of the less courageous of the Shelleyan zealots, it is urged
that, instead of definitely recommending conjugal love between a
brother and a sister as a relation to be countenanced, or even
tolerated by England in the nineteenth century, Laon and Cythna
merely reminds readers that, instead of violating any principle of
natural morals, the connubial intercourse of a brother and sister
would be unobjectionable, and might even be positively virtuous, in
a country whose laws either encourage or only permit such an
association. This apology for the prime doctrine of Laon and Cythna
may as well be considered in connexion with what the poet says on
the subject in the last sentence of the preface, which runs thus:—
‘In the personal conduct of my Hero and Heroine, there is one
circumstance which was intended to startle the reader from the
trance of ordinary life. It was my object to break through the crust
of those outworn opinions on which established institutions depend.
I have appealed therefore to the most universal of all feelings, and
have endeavored to strengthen the moral sense, by forbidding it to
waste its energies in seeking to avoid actions which are only crimes
of convention. It is because there is so great a multitude of artificial
vices, that there are so few real virtues. Those feelings alone which
are benevolent or malevolent, are essentially good or bad. The
circumstance of which I speak, was introduced, however, merely to
accustom men to that charity and toleration which the exhibition of a
practice widely differing from their own, has a tendency to promote.
Nothing indeed can be more mischievous, than many actions
innocent in themselves, which might bring down upon individuals the
bigotted contempt and rage of the multitude.’
To this last sentence of the preface to Laon and Cythna, Shelley
(obviously by an after-thought, and in consequence of the pressure
put upon him by some friend or friends) appended this foot-note
—‘The sentiments connected with and characteristic of this
circumstance have no personal reference to the writer’!!!
The last paragraph of the preface to Laon and Cythna is preceded by
these words, ‘Love is celebrated everywhere as the sole law which
35. should govern the moral world.’ Having regard to the abrupt
transition from the present to the past tense, the significant
difference (in style) of the last paragraph from the preceding
paragraph, and the known conflict that occurred between the author
and publisher before the poem had passed the press, few critical
readers will decline to think with me that the last paragraph, instead
of being part of the preface when it left Shelley’s pen, was an after-
thought, written to meet Ollier’s objections to the incestuous relation
of Laon and Cythna. Nor will it, I think, be questioned, that the
astounding note was an after-thought to the after-thought, and was
put at the foot of the last paragraph, because Ollier, or Hunt, or
Peacock, pointed out to the author that the poem, commending the
incest of brother and sister, would expose him to the most hideous
of imputations.
But what do the statements of the last paragraph amount to? (1)
That in making Laon and Cythna live like a married couple, the poet
merely aimed at startling his readers out of the trance of ordinary
life.—(2) That in so startling his readers he wished to enable them to
break away from the notion, that there was something inherently
vicious in a brother’s connubial association with his own sister.—(3)
That Shelley rated such incest as a mere crime of convention, to be
placed in the same category with offences against the game-laws,
the excise-laws, or a custom’s tariff.—(4) That feelings should not be
judged by their results, but by their effect on the disposition of the
person entertaining them.—(5) That in so startling his readers out of
an antiquated repugnance to the particular kind of incest, he hoped
to render them tolerant of, and charitable towards, persons
committing the mere offence against conventional morality.—(6)
That though, in his opinion, no rule of natural morals forbade a man
to marry his own sister, the poet thought his readers had better
refrain from such incest, since, though innocent in itself, the
perpetration of it would be likely to infuriate the bigoted multitude.
This from the man who, according to his most fervid idolaters, would
have redeemed the world from sin and wretchedness, had he
worked for its regeneration under auspicious circumstances.
36. Is the incest of brother and sister a mere crime of convention? The
science of morals, of course, is progressive. What is virtue in a rude
state of society becomes crime in a high state of civilization. Some
countries, lying well within the wide and vague boundaries of
civilization, are behind other countries in the science of morals. What
is crime in England may be honesty in Thibet. There are offences
about which we may hesitate to say off-hand, whether they are
offences against natural morals or mere crimes of convention. But
surely action that is maleficent to the mental and physical welfare of
mankind, wherever it may be practised, is not action about which
there can be any uncertainty. Permitted in the country, where (by his
own confession in prose) he commended it to tolerance and
charitable consideration, the license commended by Shelley would
poison the springs of domestic virtue, whilst producing its universal
results on the bodily shape, nervous force, and moral health of the
people. Permitted amongst the settlers on a barbarous coast, it
would in a few generations be fruitful of such physical infirmity and
debasement, as are ever accompanied with moral depravation.
Action so universally maleficent is universally wicked. Though it may
be less mischievous in its consequences, the conduct recommended
in Laon and Cythna is no less essentially wicked, in a small and
thinly populated island, than in a great city.
The poem having been written to the last line, Shelley sent it to
Messrs. C. and J. Ollier, of Welbeck Street, whom he had selected for
his publishers, at the request of their friend Leigh Hunt. As the book
was to be produced at Shelley’s cost, the publishers of course
wished to publish it. But these gentlemen looked for money, instead
of disaster, from business with their client. On finding that the poem
was an apology for incest, they took counsel with one another, and
probably with their lawyer. The result was that, when the poem was
nearly, if not altogether printed, one of the Messrs. Ollier wrote to
Shelley, stating they could not venture to produce a work, so certain
to put them in an ignominious position. Instead of feeling for the
men of business, and shrinking from the thought of injuring them,
Shelley urged them to go on in the road to ruin. But the publishers
37. were less manageable than Shelley hoped to find them. They
repeated their wish to be quit of so dangerous a book. Whereupon,
dating from Marlow, on 11th December, 1817, Shelley wrote the Mr.
Ollier (who was attending to the matter) a letter that contained
these words,—
‘There is one compromise you might make, though that would still
be injurious to me. Sherwood and Neely wished to be the principal
publishers. Call on them, and say that it was through a mistake that
you undertook the principal direction of the book, as it was my wish
that it should be theirs, and that I have written to you to that effect.
This, if it would be advantageous to you, would be detrimental to,
but not utterly destructive of, my views. To withdraw your name
entirely, would be to inflict on me a bitter and undeserved injury.’
(Vide Shelley Memorials.)
To see the nature of this advice, readers must remember how usual
it was in former time for several different firms of booksellers to be
concerned in the publication of the same work. The principal
publisher in these joint-enterprises,—i.e. the publisher in negotiation
with the author, and to whom the author looked as his publisher—
had the direction of, and chief responsibility in, the business. His
name, or the name of his house, appeared on the title-page before
the names of the other publishers. Thus holding a place of honour,
he held also the post of greatest danger; for in case of proceedings
against the author and publisher of an unlawful publication, it was
the way of the law to hold the first and principal publisher as more
responsible than the other associated booksellers, and even in some
cases to regard the latter as being in no degree morally accountable
for the contents of the work. In accordance with this trade-usage,
Messrs. Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, of Paternoster Row, were
associated in 1817, as second and subordinate publishers with
Messrs. C. and J. Ollier, of Welbeck Street.
Shelley’s suggestion was that, as the Olliers were frightened, they
should slip out of the more dangerous position, by inducing
Sherwood, Neely, and Jones to step into it by misrepresentation. The
38. Olliers were instructed by Shelley to tell the other set of publishers
an untruth, that was a rather complicated untruth. They were
instructed to keep their alarm to themselves, and say to their
comrades in the trade, ‘We took the principal direction of the book
through a mistake’ (a sheer untruth), ‘as it was Mr. Shelley’s wish for
you to be his principal publishers’ (another sheer untruth), ‘and
therefore as Mr. Shelley has written us to that effect’ (a third untruth
on a point of fact) ‘we think even at this late stage of the business
you had better figure as principal publishers’ (a false suggestion of
motive). That the Olliers did as Shelley thus instructed them, may be
inferred from the fact that, on the title-page (the 1818 title-page) of
Laon and Cythna, Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, figure as principal
publishers.
Laon and Cythna was published, in so far that a few copies (three
copies, according to some writers on the subject, but probably a
larger number) passed into circulation; one of them being the copy,
that afforded the Quarterly Reviewer an opportunity for making his
memorable onslaught on the book. But this had barely been
accomplished, when the poem was an addition to the considerable
list of the works, written by Shelley and speedily suppressed. What
was the immediate cause of the renewal of their alarm does not
appear; but the book was no sooner out, than the Messrs. Ollier
decided that not another copy should be issued with their name on
the title-page. Probably they acted on their lawyer’s urgent
representation, that, unless it were promptly suppressed, so
scandalous a book would certainly result in their prosecution. It has
been repeatedly averred that their alarm proceeded chiefly from the
freedom with which the poem dealt with matters of religion and
politics. But the changes which converted Laon and Cythna into The
Revolt of Islam, show that this was not the case. Some of the
changes, no doubt, modified the terms relating to the Almighty; but
the prime purpose of the alterations was to relieve the poem of its
incestuous sentiment. Unquestionably the publishers were alarmed
by the book’s blasphemy and political extravagance; but their most
serious apprehension was fear of such an outcry against the poem’s
39. indecency, as would put them on trial for issuing an obscene book.
On reconsideration the publishers saw that in case of such a
prosecution, it would avail them nothing that their name appeared
after ‘Sherwood, Neely, and Jones,’ on the title-page of the book, of
which they would be proved to have been the principal publishers.
No wonder they were firm. No wonder also that Shelley was in the
highest state of excitement for his own interests,—and of indignation
at his publisher’s cowardice. What the Olliers felt was, of course, felt
by the other publishers.
Matters were in this position, when it occurred to some ingenious
student of the suppressed poem, that it would be easy to relieve the
work of its incestuous quality and some of its most objectionable
passages touching religion, by cancelling a few leaves and replacing
them with leaves, that would change the character and complexion
of the whole performance. By dropping the final paragraph (with its
note) from the Preface, producing a new title-page, and altering
fifty-five lines of the body of the book, it would be easy to
manipulate, at a trifling cost, the printed sheets out of their
egregious offensiveness into comparative innocence. Who was the
originator of this ingenious suggestion does not appear; but the
editorial ingenuity of the proposal inclines one to attribute it to Leigh
Hunt. Anyhow, the suggestion was carried out by a council,
consisting of one of the Messrs. Ollier, the author, Peacock, and
some other of the author’s personal friends (Leigh Hunt and Hogg
being, no doubt, of the number). Never perhaps was stranger work
done by a literary committee at successive meetings. At the sittings
of the council, Shelley (says Peacock) ‘contested the proposed
alterations step by step; in the end, sometimes adopting, more
frequently modifying, never originating, and always insisting that his
poem was spoiled.’ No wonder he fought his friends point by point.
The poem had been written to demonstrate the purity and loveliness
of the extremest kind of Free Love. By changing Cythna from Laon’s
sister, to a mere orphan, living under the protection of his parents,
the alterations deprived the poem of the prime doctrine it was
intended to inculcate. The poem that should have proclaimed the
40. beauty and holiness of incestuous Love was manipulated into a mere
poetic apology for Lawless Love of an ordinary and less interesting
kind. So castrated, the Poem of Incest could no longer generate the
sentiment, whose activity was needful, in Shelley’s opinion, for the
attainment of ‘a happier condition of moral and political society.’ As
any reader may learn from a careful study of the poem, enough
mischief was left in The Revolt of Islam to satisfy an ordinary
enthusiast for lawless love; but Shelley was an ‘extra’-ordinary
enthusiast for wedlock without restrictions. It is imputed to him for
righteousness by his idolaters, that he persisted to the last in the
pure and unqualified doctrine of the unaltered poem. In reference to
Lady Shelley’s quite inaccurate statement that the poet (in 1817-18)
was ‘convinced of the propriety of making’ the ‘alterations,’ which
converted Laon and Cythna into The Revolt of Islam, Mr. Buxton
Forman remarks proudly of the teacher, who might have been the
Saviour of the World, ‘There is nothing in his subsequent history to
countenance the idea that he regarded Laon and Cythna as in any
way offensive.’
But before the superlatively offensive poem had been manipulated
into a comparatively inoffensive one, some copies of Laon and
Cythna had passed from the publisher’s hands to the world. Whether
these copies were no more, or several more, than three, does not
matter. If they were only three, they were enough to darken the
poet’s fame and cloud his happiness for the rest of his days. Three
hundred copies in circulation could not have been more disastrous to
his social credit than those three, one of which was lent to the
Quarterly Reviewer.
Is it wonderful that Shelley, during the few years still remaining to
him of a brief existence, lived under the world’s ban, and though
producing works of incomparable art in quick succession, produced
them only to stir the wrath of critics, and aggravate the pain he
endured from the world’s neglect of his genius? It was known, and
could not be gainsaid, in every coterie of men of letters, how
abruptly he had left his first childish wife; how, on breaking with so
41. young and lovely a creature, he told her to ‘do as other women did’;
how within a few weeks of breaking with this girl, he had carried off
his familiar friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter; and how in language
of matchless beauty and vigour, he had used all the powers of his
poetic genius, not only to deride marriage, but to teach his readers
that the most repulsive and blighting of all the several kinds of
incestuous love was wholesome, innocent, and beautiful. Is it
surprising that in less than a year and four months from the
publication of Laon and Cythna, he wrote from Rome to Peacock, ‘I
am regarded by all who know or hear of me, except, I think, on the
whole, five individuals, as a rare prodigy of crime and pollution,
whose look even might infect?’ Is it surprising that, critics, fully
cognizant of the power and many excellences of his poetry, forbore
to extol his genius, from a conscientious repugnance to his social
philosophy, and a fear that by applauding the poet they should
strengthen the hands of the social innovator? Is it surprising that,
whilst temperate and judicious men of letters were silent about what
they secretly admired, but could not venture to openly commend,
less discerning critics in their abhorrence of the social innovator,
wrote wild nonsense about the stupid trash, the drivel and
buffoonery of his finest productions?
Of course, these less discerning critics had better have imitated the
more temperate and discreet men of letters, and held their peace.
But critics are human; and when men speak under the influence of
strong resentment, they are apt to say wild things. To point to the
angry things written to Shelley’s discredit, when the passions he had
stirred were at their fiercest rage, as evidence of a singular and
unaccountable blindness to the excellences of fine poetry, is to
misread the signs of a former time. Like Byron, the author of Laon
and Cythna provoked a storm he was not permitted to survive;
though he would have survived it, had he lived to middle age and
continued to write in the vein of Prometheus Unbound and Adonais.
It is not wonderful that violent things were said of the man, who had
done violence to society’s finest sensibilities. What occurred to his
annoyance more than sixty years since would occur now-a-days to a
42. similar offender,—say, to a novelist of high culture and singular
aptitude for his department of literary art, guilty of producing a novel
whose hero and heroine, born of the same parents, and reared in
the same home, should live and love like Laon and Cythna; the
whole romance being cunningly devised and skilfully worked out, for
the purpose of luring readers to the opinion that brothers and sisters
ought to be allowed to marry one another. After all that has been
done during the last fifty years to make people tolerant of the Free
Contract, what would happen if such a story came to us one fine day
from the pen of a young and remarkably able writer (ætat. 25),
together with his assurance that the work was ‘an experiment on the
temper of the public mind,’ and an attempt to bring about ‘happier
conditions of moral and political society?’ Would critics be mealy-
mouthed and weigh their words precisely in declaring the
experiment an outrage, and the attempt a monstrous scandal?
Would they be less outspoken on discovering that the young writer,
at so early a stage of his existence, had put away his first wife,
seduced his intimate friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter, written
strongly on previous occasions against chastity and conjugal
constancy, and been declared by the Lord Chancellor a person
whose conduct proved him unfit to have the charge of his children?
One is often asked to explain what is meant by ‘the irony of fate.’ It
is easier to explain a term by an example than by words. It was
fate’s irony that, whilst the poet, who exhibited a brother’s
incestuous intercourse with his sister as sinless and beautiful,
escaped the imputation he may be said to have invited by the
personal note at the end of the Preface, the world was induced to
charge the crime passionately on another poet, who had only written
of such incest vaguely as an enormity of wickedness, or mockingly
as the familiar arrangement of a remote period. Another example of
fate’s irony is found in the fact that, when Byron was suffering in
posthumous fame from the Beecher-Stowe calumny, the more fervid
of the Shelleyan enthusiasts and the more fervid of the Shelleyan
socialists combined to decry him as a prodigy of wickedness for
practising the form of Lawless Love, which Shelley had declared
43. compatible with virtue. Fate also was set upon another exploit in
irony, when she determined that the poem, which a committee of
men of the world declared unfit for circulation during the profligate
Regency, should be produced verbatim for the moral edification of
the men, and women, and young people of Victorian England.
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