Half the fertility of such a soul is
lost, and the other half is denaturalised. No doubt, in its sturdy
deformity, the practical mind is an instructive and not unpleasing
object, an excellent, if somewhat pathetic, expression of the climate
in which it is condemned to grow, and of its dogged clinging to an
ingrate soil; but it is a wretched expression of its innate
possibilities. Shelley, on the contrary, is like a palm-tree in the
desert or a star in the sky; he is perfect in the midst of the void.
His obtuseness to things dynamic--to the material order--leaves his
whole mind free to develop things aesthetic after their own kind; his
abstraction permits purity, his playfulness makes room for creative
freedom, his ethereal quality is only humanity having its way.
We perhaps do ourselves an injustice when we think that the heart of
us is sordid; what is sordid is rather the situation that cramps or
stifles the heart. In itself our generative principle is surely no
less fertile and generous than the generative principle of crystals or
flowers. As it can produce a more complex body, it is capable of
producing a more complex mind; and the beauty and life of this mind,
like that of the body, is all predetermined in the seed. Circumstances
may suffer the organism to develop, or prevent it from doing so; they
cannot change its plan without making it ugly and deformed.
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