In Queen Mab, Shelley then turns to how the animal kingdom would respond if man ‘no longer’ acted like their bloodthirsty tyrant. Shelley’s fantasy about the cessation of treachery between humans and their animal victims echoes the proclamation of an earlier poem by the radical poet John Wolcot, alias Peter Pindar (1738–1819):
I cannot meet the lambkin’s asking eye,
Pat her soft cheek, and fill her mouth with food
Then say, ‘Ere evening cometh, thou shalt die,
And drench the knives of butchers with thy blood.’
As in Shelley, this ‘abdication’ from violence makes wild and domestic animals miraculously gather round the human with a ‘fearless eye’.41 In his prose works, where he focused on the anthropocentric motives for vegetarianism, Shelley did not discuss precisely how this aspect of his vegetarian vision would be achieved; but in his poems it is a revealing refrain.
Despite the fact that he professed to be an atheist at this time, Shelley’s imagery in Queen Mab and other poems is explicitly modelled on the millennial restitution of paradisal harmony. Like the Turkish Spy more than a century earlier, Shelley was deliberately reclaiming Judaeo-Christian salvation and recreating it as a secularised image of future perfection. He once explained to a friend that ‘my golden age … will be the millennium [sic] of the Xtians “when the lion shall lay down with the lamb”.’42 In Queen Mab, Shelley recycled that very image from Isaiah:
The lion now forgets to thirst for blood:
There might you see him sporting in the sun
Beside the dreadless kid; his claws are sheathed,
His teeth are harmless, custom’s force has made
His nature as the nature of a lamb.43
Shelley believed that it was custom that had perverted man’s herbivorous nature into unnatural meat-eating; here he suggests that through ‘custom’ the carnivores’ predatory nature could be transformed into that of a ‘harmless’ herbivore. It may seem like a contradiction that Shelley argued that humans should be vegetarian because they were naturally herbivores, and yet that ‘natural’ carnivores would ideally turn into herbivores. But in fact it reveals Shelley’s belief in the emerging proto-evolutionary theory that species could change their nature over time.44 Although ferocity might have become ‘natural’ to the lion, Shelley’s basic assumption was that ferocity was not in fact natural to nature. Thus, according to Shelley, eradicating predation would not be a reformation of nature’s laws, but a restoration of them. He was convinced, like Lambe, Newton and his father-in-law William Godwin, that nature was solely good and therefore anything evil was artificial and unnecessary. For Shelley, nature did not mean ‘everything that is’, nor even ‘everything that is non-human’; it meant ‘everything that is good’: anything that did not fit his own aesthetic ideal of nature was by definition ‘unnatural’. Shelley could not reconcile anything poisonous or predatory, anything barren like deserts or winter, with his quasi-prelapsarian idea of nature and thus he classified them, along with social injustice, as extraneous and aberrational. As his second wife, Mary, explained: ‘The prominent feature of Shelley’s theory of the destiny of the human species was that evil is not inherent in the system of the creation, but an accident that might be expelled … That man could be so perfectionized as to be able to expel evil from his own nature, and from the greater part of the creation, was the cardinal point of his system.’45 Like his friend Newton who had a predilection for Zoroastrianism, Shelley envisaged a Manichean struggle in which good was striving to expunge unnatural corruption from the universe.
In dividing the world thus, Shelley was adopting an alternative to the orthodox claim that ‘evil’ was part of a benevolent grand plan, as articulated by theodicists like Archbishop William King and John Clarke in their works On the Origin of Evil (1702 and 1720 respectively), and by Buffon and Darwin in their quasi-materialist apologia for nature. In their attempt to show that there was nothing absolutely evil in the world, they had argued that the apparent evil of predation was in fact a necessary and desirable part of nature’s system. Shelley agreed that there was no evil in the system of nature, but he rejected the theodicists’ explanation of predation as sophistical attempts to excuse the ways of God to man. William Godwin and the highly influential Reverend William Paley conceded that predation seemed to be at odds with the idea of universal benevolence, and Ritson had argued that it was enough to prove that there was no benevolent design in nature.46 Shelley agreed with Ritson that predation was irreconcilable to the notion of benevolence, but his solution was to suggest that such things were not really part of nature.
For Shelley, meat-eating was the Pandora’s box that introduced savagery into the world, and vegetarianism was the key with which it could be locked away again. Eating animals was the equivalent of the Fall; it turned man into the tyrant of the world and introduced inequality into both natural ecologies and human society. By ceasing to eat animals, man would return to his natural place as ‘An equal amidst equals’. This ‘egalitarianism’ may suggest that Shelley was against anthropocentrism per se; but in fact there were still important elements in his thinking that kept men at the centre of the world even after being dethroned from their unnatural despotism. Shelley’s anthropocentrism is more subtle and complicated than it at first appears.
The idea that converting to vegetarianism could rectify cosmic imbalance and re-establish harmony between all the animals seems to attribute to man an extraordinary transcendent power, traditionally associated with the Christian notion that animals and the rest of the universe had ‘fallen’ into a corrupted state, and were awaiting man’s millennial regeneration.47 It seems also that Shelley entertained an arbitrarily sanitised ideal of nature (though it is no more or less absurd from a modern perspective than the dominant contemporaneous theory, expounded by the theodocists, that mosquitoes, disease and poisonous berries were among God’s benevolent gifts to mankind). Shelley’s idea that man and nature could be cleansed of all viciousness sounds similar to the optimistic prophecies of the radical quack James Graham or the mystical visions of Thomas Tryon – and it is customary to read Shelley’s faith in this as hyperbolic poetic licence or faddish naïvety.48 But in fact there had been a convergence of circumstances in the late eighteenth century which made the possibility of reestablishing harmony with animals look distinctly plausible. Shelley, who followed developments in science with care, knew that some of the most eminent scientists of the age agreed.
In 1764 the French circumnavigator Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville, had landed on the little known island of Malouine (in the Falkland Islands) and was greeted with an awesome sight. The wildlife on the island, which had no experience of human beings, approached his men ‘without fear’: ‘The birds suffered themselves to be taken with the hand, and some would come and settle upon the people that stood still.’ Some Christians saw this as a vestige of the animals’ prelapsarian instinct to proffer themselves to their rightful human lords; but to others it implied a natural state of mutual trust. To Bougainville this touching scene seemed to prove ‘that man does not bear a characteristic mark of ferocity’. It was a captivating image, and a flood of similar stories emerged in the ensuing decades – indeed, they are still evoked today in serious discussions of human relations to the environment. Lord Monboddo recited Bougainville’s story to back up his argument that humans were naturally herbivorous, vividly imagining that ‘all the animals came about him and his men; the fowls perching upon their heads and shoulders, and the fourfooted animals running among their feet.’ He too observed that ‘if man had been naturally an animal of prey, their instinct would have directed them to avoid him.’ Erasmus Darwin copied this description out of Monboddo and added to it instances of similar experiences reported by Professor Johann Gmelin about foxes in Siberia ‘that expressed no fear of himself or companions, but permitted him to come quite near them, having never seen the human creature before’. According to Darwin this suggested that ‘the fear, [animal
s] all conceive at the sight of mankind, is an acquired article of knowledge,’ and thus that humans might be able to re-establish a trusting relationship with animals by being kind to them ‘if they were not already apprized of our general malevolence to them’. Darwin implied that even carnivores could overcome their ferocity and related the story told by his contemporary Gilbert White, the famous naturalist revered by modern environmentalists, about a cat who nursed an orphan hare with gentle maternal kindness. Even tigers, according to the sugar-enthusiast Benjamin Moseley, could be rendered utterly harmless by being raised on a vegetarian regime.49
Such observations corroborated the millennial fantasy indulged by the animal advocate Humphry Primatt, in 1776, that if people obeyed God’s law to be merciful to animals, ‘All would be peace, harmony, and love. Men would become merciful; Savage Brutes, would become tame; and the tame Brutes would no more groan under the lash … all, both Men and Brutes, would experience the blessing of the renovating change.’50 It seemed that the idealistic dreams of David Graham, John Williamson and Thomas Tryon were being substantiated by empirical evidence. The vegetarian anthologist George Nicholson seized on Darwin’s concatenation of such material, and added the still more sensational report contained in Georg Foster’s account of Captain Cook’s Voyage Round the World. On their arrival at Dusky Bay, New Zealand in 1773, Cook’s crew found that ‘Numbers of small birds which dwelt in the woods were so little acquainted with men, that they familiarly hopped upon the nearest branches, nay on the ends of our fowling-pieces … This little boldness in reality at first protected them from harm, since it was impossible to shoot them when they approached so near.’51 It did not take the animals long to learn that humans were best avoided, however. As Bougainville reported sinisterly: ‘This confidence was not of long duration with them; for they soon learnt to mistrust their most cruel enemies.’52
To Shelley, Lambe and Newton, these momentous events confirmed the claim made by Plutarch, Gassendi and innumerable others that humans did not have a carnivorous anatomy. Were mankind predatory in appearance, then animals would instinctively know to avoid them: but man, observed Shelley, ‘has neither the fangs of a lion nor the claws of a tiger’. If being afraid of man was learned rather than instinctive, as scientists seemed to agree, it followed that if man stopped teaching the animals he was dangerous – that is, if he stopped killing them – they would lose their fear of him and join with him in trusting community. In Queen Mab Shelley pointed specifically to this anatomical aspect: the birds no longer ‘Flee from the form of man’. They have become ‘dreadless’ and just like the Falklands birds they gather round and settle on people’s arms.53
Still more categorically, Captain Cook’s report from New Zealand disproved Buffon and others’ claims that predation was essential for maintaining balanced ecologies. The Cook report had accurately observed that, aside from the few comparatively recently arrived Maoris, there were no terrestrial predators in New Zealand – and yet there was a thriving ecology apparently living in total harmony. The birds in Dusky Bay were not even afraid of the ship’s cat, said the report, for they ‘were not aware of such an insidious enemy’. Here, as far as Shelley was concerned, was a natural ecology in which even predation between animals was unknown. It seemed to embody the true egalitarian state of nature on which the myths of Eden and the Golden Age had been originally based – and it was this image he recycled in Queen Mab. To Shelley, it may even have seemed a logical conclusion that humans were responsible for introducing predation into the natural world, for it was in the places untouched by human interference that predators were absent. Ecologies which ‘had not yet undergone any changes from the hands of mankind’, as the Cook report put it, appeared to be non-hierarchical and non-predatorial.54 If humans stopped being predators, animals would learn to trust them and a harmonious predation-free social ecology could be re-established all over the earth.
Dr Lambe followed Shelley in his enthusiasm:
There is no antipathy between man and other animals, which indicates that nature has intended them for acts of mutual hostility. Numerous observations of travellers and voyagers have proved, that in uninhabited islands, or in countries, where animals are not disturbed or hunted, they betray no fear of men: the birds will suffer themselves to be taken by the hand; the foxes will approach him like a dog. These are no feeble indications, that nature intended him to live in peace with the other tribes of animals.55
Lambe’s argument introduced a subtle new scenario to the theme of the uninhabited island, for he included inhabited ‘countries, where animals are not disturbed or hunted’. These were more relevant to the cause of vegetarian reform because rather than being islands where humans were unknown, they were places where animals had developed a harmonious relationship with humans in response to people’s benign behaviour. The most obvious example of where this was believed to have happened was India. Ever since the seventeenth century, travellers had spoken about extraordinary relations between Indians and their animals, and these images began to take on new vividness in the second half of the eighteenth century. Joseph Ritson picked up on them, and alongside his extracts from the voyages of Cook and Bougainville he reproduced a section of Pierre Marie François de Pagès’ Travels Round the World (undertaken in 1767–71), which elevated the fantasy to another order. In the region around Surat, Pagès claimed that the Hindus were so humane that animals – even predators – had become docile:
The birds of the air, undismayed by our approach, perch on the trees and swarm among the branches, as if they conceived man to be of a nature equally quiet and inoffensive with themselves … Even the more formidable quadrupeds seem to have lost their natural ferocity in the same harmless dispositions; and hence the apprehensions commonly occasioned by the proximity of such neighbours, no longer disquiet the minds of the natives. Happy the effect of those mild and innocent manners, whence have arised peace and protection to all the inferior animals!56
This ‘empirical’ evidence provided for Shelley one element which the ‘pristine’ ecologies of New Zealand and the Falklands did not: in those remote islands there had been no predatory species, whereas here the people’s vegetarianism has transformed the predators’ nature from ‘ferocious’ to ‘harmless’ (the very word Shelley used in Queen Mab). These stories followed in the wake of Rousseau’s Julie – which Shelley described as ‘an overflowing of sublimest genius, and more than mortal sensibility’ – and thus they joined with Julie’s animal sanctuary and Paul et Virginie’s tropical Eden into Romanticism’s web of beliefs about the possibilities for man’s relationship with nature.57
Despite his contempt for the Brahmin priestcraft,58 like Ritson, Shelley nevertheless saw the Hindus as prime exemplars of how vegetarianism made people gentle and re-established natural harmony, without the deus ex machina of orthodox Christianity. Indian vegetarianism allowed Shelley to reclaim the millennial myth from transcendental religion, and replace it into the natural law from which he believed it had originally been culled. Bloodless ecologies provided a materialist aesthetic still more ancient than religious myth.
Ever since his undergraduate days at Oxford (before he was expelled for atheism), Shelley had studied the works of the ‘Eastern travellers’ and the Orientalists, Sir William Jones, Edward Moor and William Robertson. He had, of course, also read Monboddo and thus absorbed second-hand the work of John Zephaniah Holwell.59 He was friends with Thomas Forster who was so impressed after studying Hindu and Pythagorean philosophy that he published numerous works arguing that animals had immortal souls and humans were not naturally carnivorous.60 Shelley was so enamoured of India that he wanted to go there to see for himself and – perhaps inspired by his father-in-law’s friend John Stewart – he once wrote to Thomas Love Peacock at his office in East India House asking for advice on how to find employment in the court of an Indian maharajah.61
Shelley was particularly inspired by Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary, an Indian Tale (2nd edition, 1811) w
hich told the story of Luxima, a ‘Priestess of Brahma’, and her platonic affair with Hilarion, a Christian missionary living as an Indian sanyassin like Roberto de Nobili. By being gentle to all around her, Luxima has tamed the animals in her sacred grove, and she is first attracted to Hilarion when he acts towards her favourite faun ‘as a Hindu would have acted’. As the scholar John Drew has shown, The Missionary contained genuine Indological insights gleaned from the works of William Jones, and in particular, the character Luxima is based on the eponymous heroine of Jones’ translation of the Sanskrit drama Sakuntala in which King Dusyanta renounces hunting after encountering Sakuntala’s forest haven of tame wild animals. These stories – of which there was another version in Robert Southey’s The Curse of Kehama – no doubt had a profound influence on Shelley’s belief that vegetarianism could re-establish universal harmony. Indeed, even the diction in Queen Mab manifests this influence: Shelley’s ‘terrible prerogative’ (which he argues man must lose) echoes Hilarion’s phrase ‘dreadful prerogative’.62
These stories were particularly pertinent for Shelley’s belief that individuals had the power to change their environment – an essential element to his faith in Newton’s nudist vegetarian community at Bracknell. Shelley called vegetarianism ‘the Orphic and Pythagoric system of diet’ and he believed that his own vegetarian poetry could help to restore harmony in nature just as the mythical Greek vegetarian Orpheus charmed animals and humans with his music.63 Several of Shelley’s poems focus on solitary characters whose ‘natural diets’, like those of the perfect hermits in the Turkish Spy, restore harmony with animals. These were clearly part autobiographical fantasy, for Shelley considered himself a beleaguered individual, in Mary Shelley’s words, ‘warring with the Evil Principle’.64 They expressed John Frank Newton’s theories about the coming Golden Age and they make sense of Shelley’s claim in A Vindication of Natural Diet that vegetarianism ‘strikes at the root of all evil, and is an experiment which may be tried with success, not alone by nations, but by small societies, families, and even individuals’.65
The Bloodless Revolution Page 49
