owns and doves of vultures.
In him, as in many people, too intense a need of loving excludes the
capacity for intelligent sympathy. His feeling cannot accommodate
itself to the inequalities of human nature: his good will is a geyser,
and will not consent to grow cool, and to water the flat and vulgar
reaches of life. Shelley is blind to the excellences of what he
despises, as he is blind to the impossibility of realising what he
wants. His sympathies are narrow as his politics are visionary, so
that there is a certain moral incompetence in his moral intensity. Yet
his abstraction from half of life, or from nine-tenths of it, was
perhaps necessary if silence and space were to be won in his mind for
its own upwelling, ecstatic harmonies. The world we have always with
us, but such spirits we have not always. And the spirit has fire
enough within to make a second stellar universe.

An instance of Shelley's moral incompetence in moral intensity is to
be found in his view of selfishness and evil. From the point of view
of pure spirit, selfishness is quite absurd. As a contemporary of ours
has put it: "It is so evident that it is better to secure a greater
good for A than a lesser good for B that it is hard to find any still
more evident principle by which to prove this. And if A happens to be
some one else, and B to be myself, that cannot affect the question."
It is very foolish not to love your neighbour as yourself, since his
good is no less good than yours. Convince people of this--and who can
resist such perfect logic?--and _presto_ all property in things has
disappeared, all jealousy in love, and all rivalry in honour. How
happy and secure every one will suddenly be, and how much richer than
in our mean, blind, competitive society! The single word love--and we
have just seen that love is a logical necessity--offers an easy and
final solution to all moral and political problems. Shelley cannot
imagine why this solution is not accepted, and why logic does not
produce love. He can only wonder and grieve that it does not; and
since selfishness and ill-will seem to him quite gratuitous, his ire
is aroused; he thinks them unnatural and monstrous. He could not in
the least understand evil, even when he did it himself; all villainy
seemed to him wanton, all lust frigid, all hatred insane. All was an
abomination alike that was not the lovely spirit of love.

Now this is a very unintelligent view of evil; and if Shelley had had