ely,"
something pitiless and cruel, about quite rational reform, which
alienates the poetic mind. It must be remembered that the very thing
that makes so many objects poetical--I mean their _traditional
association_ with normal human life--is the thing that _has to be
destroyed_ if the new birth is to take place. The ice-cold austerity of
mind, indicated in the superb contempt of the Nietzschean phrase,
"human, too human," is a mood essential, if the world is to cast off
its "weeds outworn." Change and growth, when they are living and
organic, imply the element of destruction. It is easy enough to talk
smoothly about natural "evolution." What Nature herself does, as we
are beginning to realize at last, is to advance by leaps and bounds.
One of these mad leaps having produced the human brain, it is for us
to follow her example and slough off another Past. Man is _that
which has to be left behind!_ We thus begin to see what I must be
allowed to call the essential inhumanity of the true prophet. The
false prophet is known by nothing so easily as by his crying "peace"--his
crying, "hands off! enough!"

It is tragic to think how little the world has changed since Shelley's
time, and how horribly relevant to the present hour are his outcries
against militarism, capitalism and privilege. If evidence were
wanted of the profound moral value of Shelley's revolutionary
thought, one has only to read the proclamations of any international
school of socialistic propaganda, and find how they are fighting now
what he fought then. His ideas have never been more necessary than
they are today. Tolstoi has preached some of them, Bernard Shaw
others, and Mr. Wells yet others. But none of our modern rebels
have managed to give to their new thought quite the comprehensiveness
and daring which we find in him.

And he has achieved this by the intensity of his devotion. Modern
literary anarchists are so inclined to fall into jocularity, and irony,
and "human, too human" humour. Their Hamlet-like consciousness
of the "many mansions" of truth tends to paralyse the impetus of
their challenge. They are so often, too, dramatists and novelists
rather than prophets, and their work, while it gains in sympathy and
subtlety, loses in directness. The immense encouragement given to
really drastic, original thought by Nietzsche's writings is an evidence
of the importance of what might be called _cruel positivity_ in
human thinking. Shelley has, however, a