SOURCE: "Platonism in Shelley," in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, Vol. 4, 1913, pp. 72–100.

Shelley was by nature one of the most studious of all English poets; from his Oxford days onwards Greek was his favourite reading and for Plato he had a natural affinity of mind. Hogg says of him:

It is no exaggeration to affirm that, out of the twenty-four hours, he frequently read sixteen…. Few were aware of the extent and still fewer of the profundity of his reading; in his short life and without ostentation he had in truth read more Greek than many an aged pedant…. A pocket edition of Plato, of Plutarch, of Euripides, without interpretation or notes … was his ordinary companion, and he read the text straightforward for hours.

Shelley's intellectual attitude and development can be best understood if we remember that he found his sustenance mainly in two types of authors; in the Materialist writers who prepared the way for the French Revolution—D'Alembert, Helvétius, Voltaire, Cabanis, &c.,—and in the Greek tragedians and Plato.

There is, of course, an enormous difference between the scientific agnosticism of the eighteenth century and the idealism of Plato; in his youth Shelley does not seem to have been able to choose between the two systems; in Queen Mab, for instance, Voltairean scepticism and Platonic idealism lie side by side in curious incongruity, and Shelley seems unaware of the extreme self-contradictions involved in his thought. As he advances in life, however, he becomes more and more a Platonist; in the revised version of Queen Mab entitled 'The Daemon of the World', the thought is purely Platonic, and scientific materialism, always alien to his true temper, became by degrees impossible to him; in the year of his death he wrote: 'The doctrines of the French and material philosophy are as false as they are pernicious.'

None the less, in certain respects, Shelley's revolutionary theories and his Platonism were not at all antagonistic: it should not be forgotten that the thinkers who brought about the French Revolution, indeed the very members of the Tiers État themselves, found their inspiration very largely in the institutions of Greece and Rome, were always quoting classical authors, even those but little known to-day, and followed or tried to follow Greek and Roman ideals of society, while the French Revolution itself was the most striking attempt ever recorded in history to re-model a great and important state on a philosophic basis; the French Revolution might almost have been defined as an attempt to turn from a feudal constitution of society to a classical one. The very thoroughness with which the process of reconstruction was attempted suggests to us such schemes as that of Plato's Republic, which hardly differed from existing Hellenic states (i.e. Sparta) more than the new France, desired and partly achieved by the revolutionaries, differed from the France of the preceding centuries.

Modern critics are often alienated from Shelley by what appears to them the wildness of his social and ethical speculations, but they should remember that, in the poet's era, speculations no less remarkable had been made the very foundation of vast social experiments. Again, many readers are exasperated by Shelley's daring departures from accepted conventions on the subject of sex, and are inclined in consequence to accuse him of being, in all such matters, mentally morbid and unsound. They do not remember that Shelley is the disciple of the thinker who was, above all others, most daring in such speculations; Shelley's innovations, excepting only in The Revolt of Islam, are unimportant compared with the audacity of the Republic and the Symposium. Plato, indeed, is remarkable among philosophers for his union of moral and ethical fineness with extreme daring in moral speculation, and this union is just as characteristic of the disciple Shelley as it is of the master.

We may perhaps divide the ideas which Shelley borrows from Plato into four main groups: (1) General religious and philosophical ideas; (2) Cosmic speculations; (3) Social and political ideas; (4) The theory of love.

In dealing with the first group it becomes at once evident that Shelley's religious system is, speaking generally, rather Greek and Platonic than Christian or Biblical. Shelley was one of those to whom the Hebraic ideal appears naturally repugnant, his antipathy to it being as innate as Milton's sympathy. He disliked narrow-mindedness and exclusiveness, he disliked all kinds of formalism, he had the Greek detestation of priestcraft, severity of all kinds he abhorred and severity in morals appeared to him a contradiction in terms; the Jehovah of the Bible he not merely repudiates as an object of worship, he goes much further, and takes Jehovah as a supreme example of the worst type of moral evil. In Queen Mab he says of the temple at Jerusalem, in language whose anger has robbed it of all semblance of poetry:

In Prometheus Unbound Jupiter symbolizes all these religions of fear and terror which, originally given power by the mind of man (Prometheus) now tyrannize over and torture it, and the faith of the Bible is eminent among them; it is probably that

Dark yet mighty faith, a power as wide
As is the world it wasted.

Shelley had no more sympathy with modern Hebraism than with ancient Hebraism. He loved Milton, since Milton was a Republican and a daring speculator in morals, but he declares [in Defence of Poetry]: 'Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments.'

Nor was this all! Shelley not only disliked Hebraism but—a much more serious loss—he was bitterly opposed to Christianity. There may have been nothing of the ancient Hebrew in his temperament, but there was certainly a great deal of the Christian, for he has many affinities even with St. Francis. But the school of thinkers whom Shelley so greatly admired—those of the Voltairean tradition—were opposed, quite inevitably, to historical Christianity. 'Let us not forget', says Lord Morley, 'that what Catholicism was accomplishing in France in the first half of the eighteenth century, was really not anything less momentous than the slow strangling of French civilization.' Their motto of 'Écrasez l'infâme' was, under the circumstances, unescapable. Shelley inherited from them this abhorrence: historical Christianity is to him always detestable. In Prometheus Unbound he carefully distinguishes between the character of Christ, the most nobly beautiful that has ever appeared upon earth, and the horrible superstition which has perverted his teaching into one of the worst agents of evil.

One came forth of gentle worth
Smiling on the sanguine earth;
His words outlived him, like swift poison
Withering up truth, peace, and pity,
… Hark that outcry of despair!
'Tis his mild and gentle ghost
Wailing for the faith he kindled.

It was in this sense no doubt—because he hated established religions—that Shelley called himself an atheist, but the whole structure of his mind was essentially religious. His religion was, however, Platonic both in its excellences and in what some might term its defects. Shelley like Plato believes in a supreme Power; it is beyond and above the world but also within, at once immanent and transcendent; it works from within the world, struggling with the obstructions of matter, transforming matter and moulding it to Its will. Like Plato, Shelley is vividly conscious of the unity of the world and of all life, and the underlying spirit, though it reveals itself in many forms, is everywhere and essentially the same. Plato contemplates it sometimes as the One in distinction to the many, sometimes as the supreme Good rising above all lesser goods, sometimes as the supreme Wisdom, sometimes as the supreme Beauty above all lesser beauties. Shelley too celebrates this spirit in many different ways. With him also it is the One in contradistinction to the many:

The One remains, the many change and pass.
[Adonais.]

It is immanent in the world and yet transcendent; it is that Power

Which wields the world with never-wearied Love
Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above.

In the very language of the Symposium Shelley describes it as the forming and formative spirit which compels matter to its will:

It is the supreme Love above all other loves, which is represented (again in the language of the Symposium) as being excellent only in proportion as they reflect it:

It is also (as in the Phaedrus) the supreme Wisdom.

Wisdom! thy irresistible children rise
To hail thee, and the elements they chain
And their own will to swell the glory of thy train.
O Spirit vast and deep as Night and Heaven!
Mother and soul of all to which is given
The light of life, the loveliness of being.
[Revolt of Islam]

As is the case with Plato, Shelley's conception of the Supreme is much less anthropomorphic and personal than the God of the Bible. Another point of importance is that both Plato and Shelley lay hold of the idea of Deity largely from the aesthetic side. The God of the Bible is preeminently a moral ruler, a just and stern judge. Plato, loving as few men have ever loved the glorious beauty of the visible world, admires most in the Creator the element of beauty; in the Symposium the supreme vision, the highest good, is represented as the culminating point of an ascent through different stages of aesthetic perception….

[Shelley's] favourite method of approach to the supreme Power is the aesthetic one; it is the Intellectual Beauty of his early 'Hymn':

Sudden thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine—have I not kept the vow?

Again in Epipsychidion he speaks of Emily's beauty as being

In Adonais it is

That beauty in which all things work and move.

Again it should be noted that, as with Plato, Shelley's God is only doubtfully omnipotent; Plato does not appear to solve to his own satisfaction the problem of evil; faced with the dilemma that either 'He is not good or not omnipotent', Plato decides for the latter half of the dilemma and limits his Deity's omnipotence. In his later works, at least, he speaks as if there were a powerful spirit of evil interfering with the Supreme and marring its work. In the Timaeus the God of goodness has not merely helpers and subordinates but mighty opponents. In the Laws the beneficent principle of the world is matched against an evil principle which possesses contrary powers. In the Statesman we find it asserted that the evil principle at times prevails, and periods of universal disorder are said to alternate with orderly periods in which the divine goodness reigns without limitation or check. Plato even speaks occasionally as if matter were itself evil and responded with difficulty to the formative influence of the primal power.

Now in all this Shelley follows him. In The Revolt of Islam the whole poem illustrates the conflict between the powers of good and those of evil, symbolized by the fight between the eagle and the snake, the eagle being emblematic of evil and the snake of good. When Laon passes to heaven he stands

Before the immortal Senate, and the seat
Of that star-shining spirit …
The better Genius of the world's estate.

Moreover, in the same poem, the spirit of evil triumphs for a time—one of Plato's periods of disorder—since it has been aided by man, who has lent it power:

Well might men loathe their life …
For they all pined in bondage; body and soul,
Tyrant and slave, victim and torturer, bent
Before one Power, to which supreme controul
Over their will by their own weapons lent,
Made all its many names omnipotent.

This same conception—of the power for good struggling against and almost overcome by the power for evil—appears in Prometheus Unbound. Thus in the speech of Asia:

How glorious art thou, Earth! And if thou be
The shadow of some spirit lovelier still,
Though evil stain its work and it should be
Like its creation, weak yet beautiful.

In both poems the forces of evil not only predominate but predominate so far that, by the mass of mankind, they are worshipped as deities. In Prometheus Unbound (as in Plato's Statesman) the universe after a time purifies itself from this evil, and the divine goodness reigns without limitation or check.

The Greek legend of a preceding Golden Age—a reign of Saturn—is taken by Shelley as referring to a previous period of order before disorder began:

There was the Heaven and Earth at first
And light and love.

The period of 'disorder' succeeds and then the spirit of good once more becomes clearly and plainly predominant. Asia (typifying love) grows more and more beautiful. Panthea says to her:

The whole of the fourth Act is a celebration of this new reign of joy in man and nature. As the Spirits sing,

And the Semichorus sings of—

The Spirits which build a new earth and sea
And a heaven where yet heaven could never be.

Plato's idea of alternating periods of order and disorder is also utilized by Shelley in the great chorus of Hellas:

Just as Shelley is Platonic in his view of the Supreme so also he is Platonic in his conception of the soul and of the world to which the soul inherently belongs. Plato gives, of course, many different points of view. In some dialogues (Apology) he appears doubtful of the immortality of the soul, in others (Phaedo) he is practically certain of immortality but not quite clear as to the method or manner; in others again (Meno and Phaedrus) he develops his famous theories concerning the pre-existence of the soul and its reincarnation. In the Phaedrus he explains that the soul comes many times upon earth; in the intervals between its various lives it dwells in a heaven-world and, returning to the body, brings back with it prenatal memories.

Shelley, like his master, fluctuates in his belief concerning immortality; but he is, on the whole, much less assured and confident than Plato; he never seems to attain to the serene certainty of the Meno and Phaedrus. Both Plato and Shelley take what is essentially a spiritual view of the heaven-world; it represents to them a temper of mind, a condition of soul; only the pure can attain to the highest heaven, because only the pure have sufficient affinity with it; its very scenery is mind-stuff and soul-stuff; for this reason it is, as contrasted with the earth, an abode of greater reality; it is not so much another sphere, another world, as the true essence and real being of this; the soul having attained the heaven-world, is delivered from the darkness and 'errors' of the body; it beholds things as they really and essentially are and not the mere reflections of them which are all that we, in this world of matter, can ever hope to attain….

All men do not easily recall the things of the other world; they may have seen them for a short time only, or they may have been unfortunate when they fell to earth, and may have lost the memory of the holy things which they saw there through some evil and corrupting association.

The colourless and formless and intangible essence and only reality dwells encircled by true knowledge in this home, visible to the mind alone who is lord of the soul … knowledge absolute in existence absolute. [Phaedrus]

We find this conception in scores of passages in Shelley:

The painted veil which those who live call life.
[Prometheus Unbound]

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity
Until death tramples it to fragments. [Adonais]

Plato is always conscious of the life of the body as being, in comparison with the life of the soul, a mere darkness; in the unforgettable allegory of the Cave in the Republic he likens the whole race of men to beings imprisoned in a cave, weighted with chains, who have never beheld any true realities but only the shadows of such realities thrown vaguely upon a wall.

This allegory haunted Shelley; he wrote a poem (unfinished) upon the subject:

A portal as of shadowy adamant
Stands yawning on the highway of the life
Which we all tread, a cavern huge and great.

In the Triumph of Life he says—

Again, in Hellas he speaks of a joy which

Burst, like morning on dream, or like Heaven on death
Through the walls of our prison.

And again he speaks of himself as a sprite—

Imprisoned for no fault of his
In a body like a grave. ['With a Guitar']

Plato's idea of pre-existence is a fairly frequent one in Shelley:

Or

Sometimes Shelley refers only to pre-existence in a heaven-world (Epipsychidion), sometimes to re-incarnation or the succession of births and deaths:

Or again (in Prince Athanase):—

Memories of an ante-natal life
Made this, where now he dwelt, a penal hell.

The same conception is used to shed an unearthly light over the dreadful character of Cenci:

I do not feel as if I were a man
But like a fiend appointed to chastise
The offences of some unremembered world.

Sometimes he trifles with it delicately:

Your guardian spirit, Ariel, who
From life to life, must still pursue
Your happiness. ['With a Guitar']

Both Plato and Shelley admit into their heaven-world, as one of its chief delights, intercourse with the souls of the great dead. In the Apology Socrates inquires 'What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer?'

So in Adonais Shelley represents his dead poet as meeting with the souls of those who also were gifted and unfortunate and perished young:

And in The Revolt of Islam the hero and heroine are welcomed by the noble dead:

Beneath, there sate on many a sapphire throne,
The Great, who had departed from mankind.

Both Plato and Shelley, though their view of heaven is essentially a spiritual one, do at times express it by means of popular myths, such as the one given in the Gorgias or (in the Republic) the wonderful vision of Er the Armenian. Shelley gives an Elysium in the close of The Revolt of Islam, The consideration of Plato's heaven leads us to what is his chief characteristic as a thinker: the extraordinary tenacity with which he lays hold upon the world of mind; to him the world of sense, vividly as he apprehends it, is always less real, less emphatically existent than the supersensuous world; it always appears as if to him 'mindstuff were the essential material of the universe. The common man feels as if the objects of sense were the realities and all mental things 'abstractions'; to Plato the things of the mind are the only true realities, and matter is, in comparison, 'the dream and the shade'. No one has apprehended the splendour of the outer world more fully than he, but, nevertheless, he regarded it in all its magnificent variety, as being only a dull copy of certain divine ideas which, in their eternal beauty, could be seen and realized only with the eyes of the soul. He dwells, by preference, amid abstractions: they are for him a world in themselves—brighter, more vivid, more beautiful and, above all, more real than the world of so-called reality.

Now Shelley exactly resembles Plato in this: the supersensuous world is always more real to him than the one of which he can with bodily fingers lay hold; this is the cause of that extreme 'tenuity' which so many of his critics have blamed in his poetry. It is noticeable that he does not, like most poets, illustrate mental processes by physical parallels, but the reverse. As he says himself in the preface to Prometheus Unbound: 'The imagery which I have employed will be found, in many instances, to have been drawn from the operations of the human mind or from those external actions by which they are expressed.'

In Hellas he describes 'thought' as the most enduring thing upon earth:

And again:

Before passing to Plato's theories concerning ethics and man in society it may be as well to pause for a moment over his cosmic speculations; these, to modern readers, seem mainly curiosities, but they are worthy of note as they had a considerable influence upon Shelley.

In the Timaeus Plato teaches that the entire universe is the self-evolution of an absolute intelligence; thinking in accordance with the laws of its own perfection, it creates and animates the universe. All parts of this universe are inspired by their own intelligences: the sun is the visible embodiment of the supreme spirit; the planets are all divine or are under the guidance of divine spirits; Plato speaks of the 'souls' of the seven planets; the Earth also is a divine being.

Shelley has embodied all these conceptions in his poetry. In the 'Hymn to Apollo' he shows a truly Greek and Platonic feeling for the sun as the chief source to the universe, not of light and of force only but also of intelligence:

Prometheus Unbound is full of Platonic imagery concerning the soul of the Earth and the souls of the planets. The Earth takes a real part in the action of the drama; as is the case with Plato, Shelley is not quite clear whether the Earth herself is living or whether she is inspired by a spirit.

Thus, in the first Act, it is the Earth herself who lives and converses:

She speaks of joy as running through all her 'stony veins' at the birth of Prometheus, and of her whole existence becoming poisoned by anger when Jupiter tortures him. As in the Timaeus, all those various existences which are contained in the Earth are only the transformations of the same soul of the world acting upon the same matter. In the fourth Act, however, the Earth is considered in its cosmic aspect, as not being in itself alive but inspired by a planetary spirit. Ione says:

and Panthea replies:

In the fourth act of Prometheus Unbound, Shelley, in the most magical way, blends his Platonism with the ideas of modern astronomy. In the Timaeus the law of gravitation is explained by Plato as being not only an attraction of lesser bodies to greater, but as having a magnetic power. Shelley avails himself of this idea: the Moon and the Earth he represents as living spirits, and the force of gravity which binds them together as the magnetic attraction of their love; the moon circles ever around the earth:

Gazing, an insatiate bride,
On thy form from every side.

In the same way as Plato in the Timaeus, Shelley represents the universe as being a congeries of intelligences of all grades

With regard to man's nature and general position in society, Shelley again shows certain resemblances to Plato. Plato's most scientific division of man's nature is the triple one of the Republic: into the rational and appetitive souls and the body. More usually, however, Plato speaks as if man were a dualism; like most men of strong passions, he is keenly conscious of the 'war in his members'; the famous allegory in the Phaedrus of the dark horse and the white horse, the one struggling against the other, represents a mood which is predominant in him. He would have found it difficult to say with Browning's Rabbi:

Nor soul helps flesh now more than flesh helps soul.

Shelley, also, is conscious of a similar dualism. In his Prometheus Unbound it forms positively the leading idea: Prometheus is the soul of man, his mind, noble and suffering; in Jupiter is exemplified the baser side of man, his lusts and concupiscence, his errors of mind and his sins of body. Prometheus—the intellect—has originally given power to Jupiter—the ancient religions, harsh superstitions and cruel faiths which, thus enthroned, have countenanced all lusts, persecutions and abominations, and tortured the nobler part of man; this nobler part endures in desolate protest unyielding and therefore finally triumphant. The action of Prometheus Unbound is essentially a mental action which explains why so many people fail to understand it as action at all, and why to Shelley it seems all-sufficient; Jupiter, it has been pointed out, does not really resist, when his hour has struck he sinks and falls; but, according to Shelley's thought, there has been, in reality, a long conflict—the good principle has struggled for ages against the evil one—and the passing away of Jupiter marks, in fact, the passing of an obsession from man's mind. The condition of man's soul at the beginning of the drama is like that of the 'unjust man' as described in the Republic, where all the lower principles are predominant.

We have pointed out that Plato's view of the supreme Being is a more 'aesthetic' one than that taken by the Christian religion; in the same way his view of morals is largely aesthetic, in the Republic he explains how virtue is a harmony and vice a disharmony of the soul, and how disgrace and dishonour attach to a character in which the lower principles predominate. This aesthetic view of virtue is quite consistent with the greatest nobility of ethic ideal; thus in the Gorgias Plato makes Socrates maintain that the unjust man, however triumphant, is less happy than the just, that it is better to suffer the cruellest injustice rather than to injure others. Socrates affirms that the wrong-doer is punished by his own soul which becomes wretched; he suffers from an ever-increasing accumulation of misery and sin.

So in Shelley's Prometheus the Furies are represented as utterly miserable, while Prometheus amid his tortures can still pity them:

I weigh not what ye do, but what ye suffer,
Being evil. Cruel was the power which called
You, or aught else so wretched, into light.

Plato thinks the possession of arbitrary power the most corrupting influence to which the soul of man can possibly be subject: he has all the usual Greek hatred of the tyrant but intensified to the utmost degree; in the Republic he gives a frightful picture of the soul of the tyrant:

He is the natural enemy of all who are high-minded, are valiant, who are wise or wealthy; he enslaves his fellow-citizens, and is surrounded with a body-guard of the abject. The tyrant is drunken, lustful and passionate; his desires are like young ravens crying aloud for food: he will destroy even his parents to gratify his lust: he will commit the foulest murder and eat forbidden food, or be guilty of any other horrid act. His rabble are thieves, burglars, and cut-purses; tyrants will associate only with their own flatterers and tools, and are never the friends of anybody; they are treacherous and unjust; they are the very type of the worst men who have ever appeared upon earth and, just as they are the wickedest, so also they are the most miserable; a city which is enslaved by a tyrant is in the most miserable condition, full of fear, lamentation and pain. The tyrant grows worse and worse from possessing power—more jealous, more faithless, and more impious; supremely miserable, he makes every one else miserable also.

This appalling picture of the tyrant is repeatedly copied by Shelley. In The Revolt of Islam the whole land is a desolation because governed by tyrants:—

or again:

The tyrant's guards resistance yet maintain,
Fearless, and fierce, and hard as beasts of blood,
They stand a speck amid the peopled plain;
Carnage and ruin have been made their food
From infancy—ill has become their good.

He describes the king:

the King, with gathered brow, and lips
Wreathed by long scorn, did inly sneer and frown
With hue like that when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.

The tyrant is also full of treachery, and, even after he has sworn peace with the rebels, he betrays them and prevails upon his fellow tyrants to dispatch him soldiers:

… from the utmost realms of earth, came pouring
The banded slaves whom every despot sent
At that throned traitor's summons.

Jupiter again, among his other meanings, is a type of the tyrant, and the tortures he inflicts upon his noble victim are the natural result of his 'ill tyranny'.

Such is the tyrant's recompense; 'tis just!
He who is evil can receive no good,
And for a world bestowed, or a friend lost,
He can feel hate, fear, shame; not gratitude.

A picture of the tyrant more terrifying still because more human and more carefully studied is Count Cenci; arbitrary power corrupts him until his whole nature becomes a wild longing to torture those who should be most dear to him, to corrupt and ruin them and destroy their souls, and, as with Plato's tyrant, his unnatural hate is combined also with unnatural lust. Shelley has often been accused of exaggerating in his picture of Count Cenci, but to both Plato and Shelley it seemed impossible to exaggerate the wickedness of the man ruined by despotic power. A similar picture occurs in Hellas. Mahmud is another hideous type of the tyrant, his soul full of hate and lust and fear.

Plato was far beyond his time in the position he assigned to women: in the Republic he makes the wives of his guardians fully the equals of their husbands, sharing with them in all their pursuits, even in battle. So in The Revolt of Islam Cythna is fully the mate of Laon; she shares with him in his ideals of freedom; she also suffers imprisonment; she preaches revolution, she helps to inspire the nation, and finally when he, claiming the masculine privilege of sheltering her, has consented to death, she comes to share his fate. In depicting her, Shelley probably remembers also the warlike heroines of The Faerie Queene.

In the Republic Plato explains that philosophers make the best rulers of a state. Plato's conception of a philosopher was, however, essentially unlike our modern idea which suggests a professor or even a pedant; in Plato a 'philosopher' means a man of intellectual pursuits, a student, a thinker, almost certainly a lover and, very probably, a person of physical beauty.

Plato himself had been such a practical philosopher; he also had tried to assist in the government of a state, had fallen under the displeasure of a tyrant and, for a time, lost his liberty.

The 'philosopher' in Plato's sense is Shelley's ideal hero. Lionel, in 'Rosalind and Helen,' is one example: he has wealth and lineage, but is filled with the passion for liberty and inspired by love; he has a rich gift of eloquence and can sway men; he pleads against the oppressor and can move even 'the unpersuaded tyrant' to kindness.

The hero of Prince Athanase is similar; he was 'philosophy's accepted guest'. He is hated by the crowd but beloved by his friends; he and his teacher 'Zonoras' discourse together in the Platonic fashion; they read Plato's dialogues—the Symposium especially—and from them derive their inspiration. Laon is yet another example: like Plato's ideal philosopher he is 'the spectator of all time and all existence; he has the noblest gifts of nature and makes the highest use of them; … he does not fear death or think much of human life' [Republic, Book IX]. No ambition entices Laon, but he is compelled into action by the necessities of his country; he meets death with composure and tranquillity.

Shelley's general conception of society, so far as he develops one, is essentially Greek: it consists of a voluntary rule over voluntary subjects. The men who are exalted into rulers in Shelley's poems are always carried into power by the compulsion of circumstances and not by their own choice.

We may turn now to our last division of Platonic influence: the theory of love. Plato's distinctive teachings on this subject have depended mainly upon two circumstances: his philosophy of beauty and the extraordinarily high position which he ascribes to love as an inspiration in human life. Moreover, Plato blends his theory of love with his general metaphysics: he considers it not merely as something peculiar to man or to man and animals, but as a cosmic principle of the greatest nobility and power, involving man, as it were, incidentally. Of course Plato, with his myriad-mindedness, gives on this, as on so many other subjects, more than one point of view, but his most significant ideas can all be found in Shelley.

In the Phaedrus Socrates explains why beauty has such an enormous power over men; it is because they have previously beheld it in the heaven-world and, since sight is the keenest of the bodily senses, they are more powerfully stirred by beauty than by anything else: beholding it they are rapt beyond themselves and henceforward consumed with exalted desire. Such a vision is described many times in Shelley. In Alastor the hero receives the revelation of an ideal beauty, like nothing upon earth; henceforth he pursues it through the world and perishes in the vain effort to attain it.

Again, in The Revolt of Islam Laon describes Cythna:

In the Symposium Phaedrus explains that love is the source of the greatest benefits for both the lover and the beloved since they encourage each other in the practice of virtue; love implants the sense of honour and dishonour, and therefore impels to all noble deeds. Phaedrus points out that it inspired the heroes of the past—Orpheus, Achilles, Alkestis. So Shelley makes love an inspiration in his heroes. In Rosalind and Helen it exalts to noble deeds: Shelley says of his hero Lionel:

For love and life in him were twins,
Born at one birth.

Again, in The Revolt of Islam it is the chief inspiration of both Laon and Cythna; without it they would fail under the multitude of their sufferings.

In the Symposium Aristophanes dwells on the supreme need for union experienced by lovers; he puts it in a burlesque form, but its essential meaning is sincere enough—they desire a union so absolute that it becomes identity. So in The Revolt of Islam.

Or in Epipsychidion:

One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation.

Again, in the Symposium love is treated by Socrates (quoting Diotima) as being an introduction to the highest wisdom: the lover proceeds by grades and stages until he achieves the supreme vision which includes in itself all wisdom and all knowledge.

So in The Revolt of Islam.

In me communion with this purest being
Kindled intenser zeal and made me wise
In knowledge, which in hers mine own mind seeing,
Left in the human world few mysteries.

This supreme vision is described again, and with great eloquence, in Prometheus Unbound. Asia typifies the ideal love of Plato: she is a revelation of supreme beauty, she lights and kindles the world, and the final bliss of Prometheus consists in his union with her:

and the kindling power of her presence is described in the song:

Life of Life! thy lips enkindle
With their love the breath between them.

Lamp of Earth! where'er thou movest
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness.

Shelley has been blamed for making his Titan a lover, and doubtless with justice; but we can only say that he substitutes a Platonic ideal for the sterner and grander conception of Aeschylus.

In the Symposium Eryximachus explains that love is a principle which extends through all nature; it rules over all things, divine as well as human. The course of the seasons is full of it; when evil love prevails the course of the seasons is disturbed, but when the true love prevails the course of the seasons brings to men, animals, and vegetables health and plenty.

This kind of cosmic love is described in Prometheus Unbound, where it pervades all the elements, extending from the greatest of things to the least. The Sensitive Plant, again, is a poem full of Platonic ideas: a cosmic love is evident in all parts of nature, and individualizes itself in the individual flowers:

The lady herself is more beautiful in mind even than in body, and her lovely body is really the creation of her mind:

Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion,
Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean.

She serves, as it were, as the soul of the garden, and, when she perishes, its beauty and its romance decay. The Sensitive Plant itself is a type of the Platonic inspiration:

It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,
It desires what it has not, the beautiful.

In 'The Witch of Atlas' there is a certain amount of Platonism; the witch herself is of a beauty so resplendent that, beside it, everything else seems shadowy:

For she was beautiful—her beauty made
The bright world dim, and everything beside
Seemed like the fleeting image of a shade.

There is also the suggestion that love tempers opposites:

Then by strange art she kneaded fire and snow
Together, tempering the repugnant mass
With liquid love—all things together grow
Through which the harmony of love can pass.

In Epipsychidion, however, we have Shelley's fullest expression of the Platonic theory of love: large portions of the poem are almost a paraphrase of the Phaedrus. Emilia is a winged soul soaring over the darkness of earth: she is an incarnation of a brighter beauty descending from a lovelier and more wonderful world:

Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman
All that is insupportable in thee
Of light and love and immortality.

In the Phaedrus beauty is described as the only one of the ideas which has a perfectly clear and distinct image upon earth; so Emily is the

Veiled glory of this lampless universe.

She is the mirror which reflects most brightly the glory of the unseen world. The beauty of her mind is far greater than the beauty of her body, which is only its dim reflection; she is an image of the eternal beauty. She and the poet are like notes of music—formed for each other, though dissimilar. She raises the desires of the beholder to the vision of the supreme beauty; the beholder, exalted, is borne above himself and lifted to a higher world. The poet anticipates the ecstatic union of souls:

Till, like two meteors of expanding flame,
Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable.

Towards the close of his life Shelley's mind, ever growing and developing, arrived at the conclusion that the great master who had taught him so much and whom he so loved was, notwithstanding all his glories, too much at the mercy of his own erotic impulses; he says in The Triumph of Life:

The star that ruled his doom was far too fair,
And life, where long that flower of Heaven grew not,

Conquered that heart by love, which gold or pain
Or age or sloth or slavery could subdue not.

Shelley was one of those men who are, by temperament, born Platonists, and it may be surmised that, had he never read a line of Greek or even heard of Plato, except by indirect tradition only, his work would still show a certain number of affinities. Natural resemblance and close study, taken together, have resulted in saturating his whole work with Platonic thought; the above essay has aimed at giving the main outlines of this Platonic influence, but there is still a considerable amount of detail which cannot, in the space here available, be fully discussed.