The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 2 [of 2]Shelley, Percy Bysshe
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The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 2 [of 2]
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
English prose literature
The women, thus degraded, became such as it was expected they would
become. They possessed, except with extraordinary exceptions, the
habits and the qualities of slaves. They were probably not extremely
beautiful; at least there was no such disproportion in the attractions
of the external form between the female and male sex among the Greeks,
as exists among the modern Europeans. They were certainly devoid of
that moral and intellectual loveliness with which the acquisition of
knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment animates, as with another
life of overpowering grace, the lineaments and the gestures of every
form which they inhabit. Their eyes could not have been deep and
intricate from the workings of the mind, and could have entangled no
heart in soul-enwoven labyrinths.
Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were deprived of its
legitimate object, they were incapable of sentimental love; and that
this passion is the mere child of chivalry and the literature of modern
times. This object or its archetype forever exists in the mind, which
selects among those who resemble it that which most resembles it; and
instinctively fills up the interstices of the imperfect image, in
the same manner as the imagination moulds and completes the shapes
in clouds, or in the fire, into the resemblances of whatever form,
animal, building, &c., happens to be present to it. Man is in his
wildest state a social being: a certain degree of civilisation and
refinement ever produces the want of sympathies still more intimate
and complete; and the gratification of the senses is no longer all
that is sought in sexual connexion. It soon becomes a very small part
of that profound and complicated sentiment, which we call love, which
is rather the universal thirst for a communion not only of the senses,
but of our whole nature, intellectual, imaginative and sensitive, and
which, when individualised, becomes an imperious necessity, only to be
satisfied by the complete or partial, actual or supposed fulfilment
of its claims. This want grows more powerful in proportion to the
development which our nature receives from civilisation, for man never
ceases to be a social being. The sexual impulse, which is only one,
and often a small part of those claims, serves, from its obvious and
external nature, as a kind of type or expression of the rest, a common
basis, an acknowledged and visible link. Still it is a claim which even
derives a strength not its own from the accessory circumstances which
surround it, and one which our nature thirsts to satisfy. To estimate
this, observe the degree of intensity and durability of the love of
the male towards the female in animals and savages; and acknowledge
all the duration and intensity observable in the love of civilised
beings beyond that of savages to be produced from other causes. In the
susceptibility of the external senses there is probably no important
difference.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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