" In consequence he declared that
Shelley was not a classic, especially as his private circle had had an
unsavoury morality, to be expressed only by the French word _sale_,
and as moreover Shelley himself occasionally showed a distressing want
of the sense of humour, which could only be called _bete_. These
strictures, if a bit incoherent, are separately remarkably just. They
unmask essential weaknesses not only in Shelley, but in all
revolutionary people. The life of reason is a heritage and exists only
through tradition. Half of it is an art, an adjustment to an alien
reality, which only a long experience can teach: and even the other
half, the inward inspiration and ideal of reason, must be also a
common inheritance in the race, if people are to work together or so
much as to understand one another. Now the misfortune of
revolutionists is that they are disinherited, and their folly is that
they wish to be disinherited even more than they are. Hence, in the
midst of their passionate and even heroic idealisms, there is commonly
a strange poverty in their minds, many an ugly turn in their lives,
and an ostentatious vileness in their manners. They wish to be the
leaders of mankind, but they are wretched representatives of humanity.
In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if
one is out of tune with everything.
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