In him, as in many people, too intense a need of loving excludes the
capacity for intelligent sympathy. His feeling cannot accommodate
itself to the inequalities of human nature: his good will is a geyser,
and will not consent to grow cool, and to water the flat and vulgar
reaches of life. Shelley is blind to the excellences of what he
despises, as he is blind to the impossibility of realising what he
wants. His sympathies are narrow as his politics are visionary, so
that there is a certain moral incompetence in his moral intensity. Yet
his abstraction from half of life, or from nine-tenths of it, was
perhaps necessary if silence and space were to be won in his mind for
its own upwelling, ecstatic harmonies. The world we have always with
us, but such spirits we have not always. And the spirit has fire
enough within to make a second stellar universe.
An instance of Shelley's moral incompetence in moral intensity is to
be found in his view of selfishness and evil. From the point of view
of pure spirit, selfishness is quite absurd. As a contemporary of ours
has put it: "It is so evident that it is better to secure a greater
good for A than a lesser good for B that it is hard to find any still
more evident principle by which to prove this. And if A happens to be
some one else, and B to be myself, that cannot affect the question.
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