Shelley was not left standing
aghast, like a Philistine, before the threatened destruction of all
traditional order. He had, and knew he had, the seeds of a far
lovelier order in his own soul; there he found the plan or memory of a
perfect commonwealth of nature ready to rise at once on the ruins of
this sad world, and to make regret for it impossible.
So much for what I take to be the double foundation of Shelley's
genius, a vivid love of ideal good on the one hand, and on the other,
what is complementary to that vivid love, much suffering and horror at
the touch of actual evils. On this double foundation he based an
opinion which had the greatest influence on his poetry, not merely on
the subject-matter of it, but also on the exuberance and urgency of
emotion which suffuses it. This opinion was that all that caused
suffering and horror in the world could be readily destroyed: it was
the belief in perfectibility. An animal that has rigid instincts and
an _a priori_ mind is probably very imperfectly adapted to the world
he comes into: his organs cannot be moulded by experience and use;
unless they are fitted by some miraculous pre-established harmony, or
by natural selection, to things as they are, they will never be
reconciled with them, and an eternal war will ensue between what the
animal needs, loves, and can understand and what the outer reality
offers.
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