erhaps he rather
exaggerated than minimised its ugliness. But it never struck him that
its follies and crimes were human failings and the outcome of anything
that is natural in the species. The doctrines of perfectibility and
universal benevolence clothed themselves for him in the Godwinian
phraseology, but they were the instinctive beliefs of his temperament.
So sure was he of his own goodness, so natural was it with him to love
and to be brave, that he unhesitatingly ascribed all the evil of the
world to the working of some force which was unnatural, accidental,
anti-human. If he had grown up a mediaeval Christian, he would have found
no difficulty in blaming the Devil. The belief was in his heart; the
formula was Godwin's. For the wonder, the miracle of all this unnatural,
incomprehensible evil in the world, he found a complete explanation in
the doctrine that "positive institutions" have poisoned and distorted
the natural good in man. After a gloomy picture in _Queen Mab_ of all
the oppressions which are done under the sun, he suddenly breaks away to
absolve nature:

Nature!--No!
Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower
Even in its tender bud; their influence darts
Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins
Of desolate society....
Let priest-led slaves cease to proclaim that man
Inherits vice and misery, when force
And falsehood hang even o'er the cradled babe
Stifling with rudest grasp all natural good.

It is a stimulating doctrine, for if humanity had only to rid itself of
kings and priests, the journey to perfection would be at once brief and
eventful. As a sociological theory it is unluckily unsatisfying. There
is, after all, nothing more natural than a king. He is a zoological
fact, with his parallel in every herd of prairie dogs. Nor is there
anything much more human than the tendency to convention which gives to
institutions their rigidity. If force and imposture have had a share in
the making of kings and priests, it is equally true that they are the
creation of the servility and superstition of the mass of men. The
eighteenth century chose to forget that man is a gregarious animal.
Oppression and priestcraft are the transitory forms in which the flock
has sought to cement its union. But the modern world is steeped in the
lore of anthropology; there is little need to bring its heavy guns to
bear upon the slender fabric of Shelley's dream. _Queen Mab_ was a