But to exaggerate good is to
vivify, to enhance our sense of moral coherence and beautiful
naturalness; it is to render things more graceful, intelligible, and
congenial to the spirit which they ought to serve. To aggravate evil,
on the contrary, is to darken counsel--already dark enough--and the
want of truth to nature in this pessimistic sort of exaggeration is
not compensated for by any advantage. The violence and, to my feeling,
the wantonness of these invectives--for they are invectives in
intention and in effect--may have seemed justified to Shelley by his
political purpose. He was thirsting to destroy kings, priests,
soldiers, parents, and heads of colleges--to destroy them, I mean, in
their official capacity; and the exhibition of their vileness in all
its diabolical purity might serve to remove scruples in the
half-hearted. We, whom the nineteenth century has left so tender to
historical rights and historical beauties, may wonder that a poet, an
impassioned lover of the beautiful, could have been such a leveller,
and such a vandal in his theoretical destructiveness. But here the
legacy of the eighteenth century was speaking in Shelley, as that of
the nineteenth is speaking in us: and moreover, in his own person, the
very fertility of imagination could be a cause of blindness to the
past and its contingent sanctities.
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