s descriptions, far better
historical warrant, no doubt, than the beauty and happiness actually
to be found in the world could give him for his _Skylark_, his
_Epipsychidion_, or his _Prometheus_. But to exaggerate good is to
vivify, to enhance our sense of moral coherence and beautiful
naturalness; it is to render things more graceful, intelligible, and
congenial to the spirit which they ought to serve. To aggravate evil,
on the contrary, is to darken counsel--already dark enough--and the
want of truth to nature in this pessimistic sort of exaggeration is
not compensated for by any advantage. The violence and, to my feeling,
the wantonness of these invectives--for they are invectives in
intention and in effect--may have seemed justified to Shelley by his
political purpose. He was thirsting to destroy kings, priests,
soldiers, parents, and heads of colleges--to destroy them, I mean, in
their official capacity; and the exhibition of their vileness in all
its diabolical purity might serve to remove scruples in the
half-hearted. We, whom the nineteenth century has left so tender to
historical rights and historical beauties, may wonder that a poet, an
impassioned lover of the beautiful, could have been such a leveller,
and such a vandal in his theoretical destructiveness. But here the
legacy of the eighteenth century was speaking in Shelley, as that of
the nineteenth is speaking in us: and moreover, in his own person, the
very fertility of imagination could be a cause of blindness to the
past and its contingent sanctities. Shelley was not left standing
aghast, like a Philistine, before the threatened destruction of all
traditional order. He had, and knew he had, the seeds of a far
lovelier order in his own soul; there he found the plan or memory of a
perfect commonwealth of nature ready to rise at once on the ruins of
this sad world, and to make regret for it impossible.

So much for what I take to be the double foundation of Shelley's
genius, a vivid love of ideal good on the one hand, and on the other,
what is complementary to that vivid love, much suffering and horror at
the touch of actual evils. On this double foundation he based an
opinion which had the greatest influence on his poetry, not merely on
the subject-matter of it, but also on the exuberance and urgency of
emotion which suffuses it. This opinion was that all that caused
suffering and horror in the world could be readily destroyed: it was
the belief in perf