CONCLUSION

The radical, when theorizing, considers man in the abstract. He forgets about actual conditions—man with his inequalities. The only thing necessary, in his view, for the reformation of society is to lay before mankind some logical plan of action. He loses sight of the fact that other influences, besides logic, play a part in the moulding of man’s conduct. Newman says teach men to shoot around corners and then you may hope to convert them by means of syllogisms. “One feels,” Emerson writes, “that these philosophers have skipped no fact but one, namely, life. They treat man as a plastic thing, or something that may be put up or down, ripened or retarded, molded, polished, made into solid or fluid or gas at the will of the leader.”[195] The radical sees the millenium dawning upon the land every time a new scheme is proposed for the amelioration of society. They do not apply any tests to determine its adaptability to the needs of the people. It satisfies the rules of logic and for them this is sufficient. Burke considers this point in his speech, “On Conciliation with America.” “It is a mistake to imagine that mankind follow up practically any speculative principle as far as it will go in argument and in logical illation. All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights that we may enjoy others. Man acts from motives relative to his interests; and not on metaphysical speculations.”

Shelley could not understand how it is that evils continue so pertinaciously to exist in society. He believed that men had but to will that there would be no evil and there would be none. It seemed to him that he could construct inside twenty-four hours a system of government and morals that would be perfect. “The science,” Burke writes, “of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science.... The science of government being therefore so practical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes, a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.”[196]

The radical does not distinguish between essentials and non-essentials. He sees some evils in connection with an institution and forthwith would wipe that institution out of existence. Garrison thought there was something in the constitution of the United States that sanctioned slavery and so he described the constitution as “a league with death and a covenant with hell.” As late as 1820 Shelley believed that “the system of society as it exists at present must be overthrown from the foundations with all its superstructures of maxims and of forms.”[197] He sees the evil and misses the good. The radical and the conservative both sin in this, that they take the cause of their adversaries not by its strong end, but by its weakest.

Imaginative people see a few things clearly, and on that account do not see the whole. Their attention is entirely taken up with a few details. Shelley had no connected view of the world. He has brilliant, perhaps exaggerated, pictures of parts of it. He picks out some misery here and some injustice there, and condemns the whole. Again, he does not offer a complete philosophy of life for us to follow. He takes a truth here and another there and deifies them, exaggerates them as he does pictures of the world. His thoughts were so vivid that they outshone the counsels of the more conservative. They impressed him so much that he could not see their limitations. Single views, a simple philosophy suited him. For this reason he made his guides and leaders those philosophers of the eighteenth century who discarded the tortuous philosophy of the past and put forward a simple recipe which was to bring light and happiness to the world.

Radicals do a great deal of good by shaking off our social torpor and disturbing our self-sufficient complacency. But they very often cause a great deal of harm, and then society has a perfect right to defend itself against them. If they ignore the past, if they disregard the wisdom of centuries, if they tend to subvert all that has been already done, they are not effecting the betterment of society, but its destruction. True reformers link themselves with the good already existing in society and war only against its evils. They will start with things as they are. Burke says that “the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires.... By preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete.” True, progress in all the arts and sciences requires a certain readiness to experiment with the unknown and try something new. Yet if that readiness be reckless, disaster will surely be the result. Desire to move forward must be moderate, must be harmonized with distrust of the unknown if real progress is to ensue.

To improve society we must understand it, and to do this we must recognize its positive value. The work of social reformers would be more effective if they had a better knowledge of existing laws and institutions. As a rule soap-box orators declaim against things about which they know little or nothing. A clear consciousness then of the good in the world, a clear understanding of the principles which bind this social world together is indispensable to the social reformer. To understand an object is to see through its defects to the positive qualities that constitute it; for nothing is made up of its own shortcomings. Hence we must place our faith in evolution rather than revolution. Any reform that is to be made must be founded in the good at present working in the world.

It cannot be said that Shelley had a clear consciousness of the social forces at work in society or of the good being done by the institutions of his time. He admitted himself that he detested history, and one cannot form a just estimate of institutions without knowing something about their history. Had he known something about the real history of Christianity or of the development of constitutional government in England he would not probably have been the radical that he was. He did not see that the institutions of his time were the product of the efforts of generations of men; he did not realize that the social structure is the most complicated and delicate of all the products of human nature, and consequently did not appreciate the folly of some of the radical changes he proposed.

Shelley had a horror of tradition and prejudice; yet a certain amount of prejudice is necessary. A man who would solve all the problems of life without falling back on tradition would be obliged, in each of the decisions that he would make, to follow a line of thought or argumentation which would impose an intolerable burden on him. According to Shelley, the morality of an act is to be measured by the utilitarian standard, “the greatest good of the greatest number.” How though can we measure the pleasure and the pain that flows from an action? In many cases we must take the judgment of the race; we must be guided by prejudice or tradition. “Prejudice,” writes Burke, “is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.”[198]

The radical lays too much stress on the influence of institutions. Shelley ascribed to them all the evils of society. He was confident that a remodelling of them would bring about a complete reformation of society. Social wrongs are caused by men and men alone can cure them.

The radical is so taken up with his own ideas that he soon becomes eccentric. He loses, too, all sense of humor. He sees nothing but tragedy confronting him at every turn. At Leghorn, Shelley, accompanied by a friend, visited a ship which was manned by Greek sailors. “Does this realize your idea of Hellenism, Shelley?” his friend asked. “No! but it does of hell,” he replied. Almost every radical is lacking in tact, in moderation and in the sense of practical life.

The radical is apt to think that everybody is against him. He does not credit his opponents with honest convictions, and so he imagines that he is being unjustly persecuted. Shelley thought that even his father sought to injure him. “The idea,” Peacock writes, “that his father was continually on the watch for a pretext to lock him up haunted him through life.”

This brings us to several of Shelley’s traits which are characteristic of genius or insanity rather than of radicalism. In his Man of Genius Professor Lombroso says that the characteristics of insane men of genius are met with, though far less conspicuously, among the great men freest from any suspicion of insanity. “Between the physiology of the man of genius,” he writes, “and the pathology of the insane, there are many points of coincidence; there is even actual continuity.”

One of the most important of these characteristics is hallucination. Examples of geniuses who were subject to hallucinations are Caesar, Brutus, Cellini, Napoleon, Dr. Johnson, and Pope. Shortly before his death Shelley saw a child rise from the sea and clap its hands. At Tanyralt, on the night of February 26, 1813, Shelley imagined that he heard a noise proceeding from one of the parlors and immediately went downstairs armed with two pistols. There, he said, he found a man who fired at him but missed. The report of Shelley’s pistol brought the rest of the family on the scene, but none of them could find any trace of the intruder. It is generally conceded that this attack took place only in Shelley’s fertile imagination. At another time Shelley imagined that he was afflicted with elephantiasis. One day towards the close of 1813 he was traveling in a coach with a fat old lady, who, he felt sure, must be a victim of this disease. Later on at Mr. Newton’s house as “he was sitting in an arm chair,” writes Madame Gatayes, “talking to my father and mother, he suddenly slipped down on the ground, twisting about like an eel. ‘What is the matter?’ cried my mother. In his impressive tone Shelley announced ‘I have the elephantiasis.’... After a few weeks this hallucination left him as suddenly as it came.

“He took strange caprices,” writes Hogg, “unfounded frights and dislikes, vain apprehensions and panic terrors and therefore he absented himself from formal and sacred engagements.” It is well to keep this in mind when reading some of the criticism of Shelley. J. C. Jeafferson cites a long list of facts to prove that Shelley was a wilful prevaricator. Almost all of these can be explained away through the assumption that Shelley himself was deceived when he told something that did not square with the known facts of the case. “Had he,” writes Hogg, “written to ten different individuals the history of some proceeding in which he was himself a party and an eye-witness each of his ten reports would have varied from the rest in essential and important circumstances.”

“Genius,” says Lombroso, “is conscious of itself, appreciates itself, and certainly has no monkish humility.” Shelley often expressed regret that the rest of mankind was not as good as himself and his soulmate, Miss Hitchener. He thought that he had no faults.

Another characteristic of the genius is that he must be continually traveling from one place to another. This is certainly true of Shelley. He seldom remained longer than a year in one place.

Shelley in common with most sane men of genius was much preoccupied with his own ego. He loved to talk and write about himself and his opinions. The most important of his poems contain pictures of himself.

“These energetic intellects,” writes Lombroso, “are the true pioneers of science; they rush forward regardless of danger, facing with eagerness the greatest difficulties—perhaps because it is these which best satisfy their morbid energy.” Shelley was always embarking on some foolish enterprise. He ran away with a school girl without having in sight any means of support. He went to Ireland to emancipate the whole race; and after this failed he set about reclaiming a large tract of land from the sea at the little town of Tremadoc, Wales. He finally lost his life through venturing out to sea in stormy weather with an undermanned boat.[199]

Matthew Arnold’s dictum, then, that Shelley was not sane is a gross exaggeration. The characteristics of his life which would seem to uphold Arnold’s assertion are found in sane men of genius. That he was abnormal in some ways cannot be denied. In a letter which Mrs. Shelley wrote to Sir John Bowring when she sent him the holograph manuscript of the Mask of Anarchy, there is the following reference to her husband: “Do not be afraid of losing the impression you have concerning my lost Shelley by conversing with anyone who knows about him. The mysterious feeling you experience was participated by all his friends, even by me, who was ever with him—or why say even I felt it more than any other, because by sharing his fortune, I was more aware that any other of his wondrous excellencies and the strange fate which attended him on all occasions.... I do not in any degree believe that his being was regulated by the same laws that govern the existence of us common mortals, nor did anyone think so who ever knew him. I have endeavored, but how inadequately, to give some idea of him in my last published book—the sketch has pleased some of those who best loved him—I might have made more of it, but there are feelings which one recoils from unveiling to the public eye.”[200]

Shelley always remained a child. This was the opinion of one of his greatest admirers, Francis Thompson. “The child appeared no less often in Shelley the philosopher than in Shelley the idler. It is seen in his repellant no less than in his amiable weaknesses.” To this fact, perhaps, may be ascribed the luxuriance of his imagination; it is freer in childhood than in old age.

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy.
But he beholds the light and whence it flows
He sees it in his joy.[201]

He has been described as “a beautiful spirit building his many-colored haze of words and images.” For him idealism was more than a need of the spirit; it was the principal element of his being.[202] Anyone who cleared away obstacles from the path of his imagination had all the attraction of a kindred spirit. This helps to explain Godwin’s influence over him. His father-in-law advocated the entire abolition of existing institutions, and left the work of reconstruction to man’s imagination. Here it was that Shelley found full scope for the exercise of his faculties. He cannot be said to have contributed many original ideas to nineteenth century literature. “He merely familiarizes the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence.”

Radicalism is a characteristic of youth. Almost every person who is of any importance in his community will be found to have started out in life, boiling over with enthusiasm and eager to help on reform by advocating a change in this or that institution. Very often this interferes with their judgment. Bacon had this in mind when he wrote: “Is not the opinion of Aristotle worthy to be regarded wherein he saith that young men are not fit auditors of moral philosophy, because they are not settled from the boiling-heat of their affections nor tempered with time and experience.”[203] Shakespeare endorses this in Troilus and Cressida, Act II, scene 2.

not much
Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought
Unfit to hear moral philosophy.

That Shelley, had he lived, would have followed in the footsteps of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey and become a conservative may well be doubted. However, his life shows some progress in that direction. He had learned to become more tolerant of various types of men; and Stopford Brooke maintains that there are indications in Shelley’s works to show that he would have become a Christian.

It is unfortunate that Shelley never came into close personal contact with a Burke who could take him out of the region of imagination and make him appreciate the beauty of order and institutions. Had Shelley met such a one he might have been influenced in the way that the Greek Augustine was benefited by the Roman Ambrose. Southey might have helped Shelley if he had shown more consideration for our poet’s extremely sensitive feelings. Southey’s pet argument was that Shelley was too young to understand the question they were discussing. “When you are as old as I am,” he would say, “then you will see things in a different light.” Such a line of reasoning has no influence on men of Shelley’s stamp.

Aubrey De Vere, in a letter to Henry Taylor, December 12, 1882, states that Shelley’s character had two great natural defects. The first was a want of robustness which took away from him stability and self-possession. The second was his want of reverence. “There is,” he writes, “an insolence of audacity in some passages of Shelley on religious subjects which admits only of two interpretations, viz., something in his original cerebral organization doubtless augmented by circumstances that hindered proper development in some part of it or else pride in quite an extraordinary degree.” Lest this should appear to give De Vere’s complete view of Shelley I quote further from the same letter. “Something angelic there was certainly about him, something that I recognized from the first day that I read his poetry. His intelligence had also a keen logic about it.”

The radical is gifted with a powerful constructive imagination. He feels keenly the failures of institutions and is led to construct an ideal state of society. He takes all the good he knows, joins the pieces together, beautifies and adorns the picture until he has formed an earthly paradise. This has its advantages as only those whose imaginations are fired by fine ideals will ever stir the world with noble deeds. To succeed you must, as Emerson expresses it, “hitch your wagon to a star.”

Imagination has, of course, its dangers. Some are content to day dream; to live in the world of their imagination. They are impatient of the failures, of the slow, steady toil that precedes success. They forget that change works slowly. “He who has a clear grasp of a concrete ideal and a clear insight into the conditions, realization, and the difficulties in the actual world by which it is beset will be the true social reformer of the world.”[204] Shelley had a good grasp of the ideal, but he did not know how to cross over from the ideal to the real. This journey is a long and tedious one. “All progress,” MacKenzie writes, “which is guided by an ideal must be more or less of the nature of a stumble.”[205] “Our very walking,” as Goethe puts it, “is a series of falls.” Bacon writes, “certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man’s mind move in charity, rest in Providence, and turn upon the poles of the earth.” Shelley’s mind moved in charity, but turned anywhere except upon the poles of the earth.

Notwithstanding all its shortcomings radicalism fulfils a very useful purpose in society. It keeps before our eyes the ideal. “It emphasizes the moral over the material; man over property. Its prominence in society insures progress and gives promise that ideals shall not perish; that hope shall not wane, and that society shall long for perfection and peace, without which longing no progress is possible.”[206] Radicalism emphasizes the ideal; conservatism the real. Out of the two springs progress. “One is the moving power; the other the steadying power of the state. One is the sail without which society would make no progress; the other the ballast without which there would be small safety in a tempest.”[207]

It is strange that the experience of centuries has not taught men to be more tolerant towards the radical. We see how blind was the generation behind us in resisting the obvious reforms which it was asked to approve; yet it never enters our heads to suspect that the next generation will consider as obvious reforms what we consider subversive proposals, and will wonder at our stupidity in having offered any resistance to them.

Shelley was a “sentimental” rather than a “philosophical”[208] radical. He inflamed wills rather than enlightened minds. He roused men to action instead of solving difficult problems.

Man is influenced more by his emotions than by his intellect and hence the importance of the position which the sentimental radical holds in the history of society. If the radical arouses helpful emotions the amount of good he does is incalculable, so too is the amount of harm an unwise radical is responsible for.

The emotions which Shelley’s poetry arouse are on the whole helpful. True a few of the details of one or two of his works should be condemned, but these usually serve to bring out the main idea of the work which is always an inspiring one. Nobody thinks of condemning “Lear” because of the vileness of Goneril. If we would interpret any writer’s meaning and message the first thing to attend to is to regard the work “as a whole bearing on life as a whole.” Doing this we will grasp what is central, and at the same time will appreciate the true value of all details. Francis Thompson does not believe that any one ever had his faith shaken through reading Shelley. He knows, too, only of three passages to which exception might be taken from a moral point of view. Shelley extolled Justice, Freedom and Equality; and he denounced tyranny and injustice. His poetry should inspire men to be more charitable and tolerant, to seek less after wealth and the applause of the world, to sympathize more and more with suffering humanity, to return good for evil and to pursue the common good of all with more zeal and enthusiasm.

One or more of the faculties of every poet are more highly developed than those of ordinary people. In some cases it is the senses; in others the imagination. Tennyson and Wordsworth are good examples of the first class. They note and describe shades of color—in flowers, in the sky—the music of waters, and a hundred other things that escape the notice of common mortals. In Shelley it is his imagination, his faculty for feeling the sufferings of others that is abnormal. He sees a woman afflicted with elephantiasis, and straightway imagines that he himself has the same disease. Shelley keenly feels the misery around him, gives expression to that feeling, and castigates the causes of that misery.Shelley’s poetry exercises our imagination, takes us away from ourselves and makes us think about our neighbors. The great trouble with the world today is that men think only about themselves, their own wants and their own joys. If we were made to feel the sufferings of the poor one-half of the evils of society would be eliminated. Anything then that brings home to us the evils of society is a blessing. “Every grade of culture,” writes Dr. Kerby, “has its own spirit of fellowship, its own code, understanding and secrets. Hence it is that the imagination has a supreme rÔle in the neighborly relations of men. As social processes unite men in imagination, they supply the basis of concord, service and trust.... Reason may talk of social solidarity, and economic or sociological analysis may show us how intimately all men are united; the catechism may appeal to intellect and tell us that mankind of every description is our neighbor. But only they have entrance to our hearts to whom imagination gives the passport; only they are neighbors whom imagination accepts and embraces.”[209] The work of reconstructing human brotherhood is in a great measure the work of the imagination.

The objection may be raised here that although Shelley’s imagination was very strong, still he was guilty of great wrong to Harriet. In reply one may say that the imagination is only one-half the mould which forms the perfect man. The other half is made up of reason and revealed religion. Where these two parts of the mind are found together we get great men. They exist side by side in the saints. A man may know all about ascetical theology, or all about his profession, but if he has not imagination he will always be a plodder. To come more directly to our difficulty, Shelley had the motive power of imagination and the guiding force of reason, but not that of revealed religion. The result was that he went off at a tangent when he dealt with matrimony. His case should be a convincing argument to women at least that Christianity is necessary for the happiness and well-being of mankind. In so far as Shelley’s imagination was guided by the light of reason, he was a saint. Trelawny says that Shelley stinted himself to bare necessities, and then often lavished the money saved by unprecedented self-denial on selfish fellows who denied themselves nothing.

Some of Shelley’s poetry is calculated to arouse one’s anger and hatred of wrong. A people who are destitute of these emotions are fit subjects for the yoke. As long as there are men ready to take advantage of another’s weakness; as long as there are selfish men who will advance themselves at the expense of others, so long will it be necessary to keep alive in men the spirit of hatred of injustice.

The difficulty with a great many critics of Shelley is that they confound Shelley’s railing at the evils of religion and governments with railing at religion and government itself. In places, it is true, he would seem to be a complete anarchist, but then allowance should be made for the sweeping generalizations that are characteristic of poetry and radicalism. Those passages in which he would seem to condemn all religion and government should deceive no one.

No doubt it is wrong to brood too much over the misery of the world. One misses a great deal if one sees only the evil, and never sees any of the good nor experiences any of the joy of life. Extreme pessimism is as harmful as extreme optimism. The pessimism that lets in no ray of hope is a plague. Such though is not the pessimism of Shelley. His pictures of the evils of society are illumined by the reflection from the happier state of society that is about to come to pass.

Shelley would do away with government and authority. Surely, some would say, that is enough to discredit him as a thinker forever. On the contrary, it shows how far in advance of his time he was; it shows he had a good grasp of the sociological principle that the less compulsion and the more cooperation under direction there is in any state the better it is. Shelley never meant to say that he would here and now abolish all authority. No one saw more clearly than he that chaos would result from the removal of authority from society as at present constituted. When Shelley writes about freedom from authority he is picturing the ideal state where men will be just and wise. He very likely doubted that such a state was possible here below, still he thought it was incumbent on everybody to strive after this ideal. He wanted men to so perfect themselves, to so act, that laws and policemen would become less and less necessary.

Shelley may not have the “sense of established facts,” and may be unable to offer suggestions which will work out well in practice, but he does infuse a higher and a nobler conception of life into the consciousness of a people. What Wordsworth said concerning his own poems is true of the works of Shelley. “They will cooperate with the benign tendencies in human nature and society, and will, in their degree, be efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier.”