What
Shelley's mind draws from the outside, its fund of images, is like
what the germ of the body draws from the outside, its food--a mass of
mere materials to transform and reorganise. With these images Shelley
constructs a world determined by his native genius, as the seed
organises out of its food a predetermined system of nerves and
muscles. Shelley's poetry shows us the perfect but naked body of human
happiness. What clothes circumstances may compel most of us to add may
be a necessary concession to climate, to custom, or to shame; they
can hardly add a new vitality or any beauty comparable to that which
they hide.
When the soul, as in Shelley's case, is all goodness, and when the
world seems all illegitimacy and obstruction, we need not wonder that
_freedom_ should be regarded as a panacea. Even if freedom had not
been the idol of Shelley's times, he would have made an idol of it for
himself. "I never could discern in him," says his friend Hogg, "any
more than two principles. The first was a strong, irrepressible love
of liberty.... The second was an equally ardent love of toleration ...
and ... an intense abhorrence of persecution." We all fancy nowadays
that we believe in liberty and abhor persecution; but the liberty we
approve of is usually only a variation in social compulsions, to make
them less galling to our latest sentiments than the old compulsions
would be if we retained them.
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