Liberty of the press and liberty to vote
do not greatly help us in living after our own mind, which is, I
suppose, the only positive sort of liberty. From the point of view of
a poet, there can be little essential freedom so long as he is
forbidden to live with the people he likes, and compelled to live with
the people he does not like. This, to Shelley, seemed the most galling
of tyrannies; and free love was, to his feeling, the essence and test
of freedom. Love must be spontaneous to be a spiritual bond in the
beginning and it must remain spontaneous if it is to remain spiritual.
To be bound by one's past is as great a tyranny to pure spirit as to
be bound by the sin of Adam, or by the laws of Artaxerxes; and those
of us who do not believe in the possibility of free love ought to
declare frankly that we do not, at bottom, believe in the possibility
of freedom.
"I never was attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is that each one should select,
Out of the crowd, a mistress or a friend
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion; though it is the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.
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