them.

We have seen that Shelley, being unteachable, could never put together
any just idea of the world: he merely collected images and emotions,
and out of them made worlds of his own. His poetry accordingly does
not well express history, nor human character, nor the constitution of
nature. What he unrolls before us instead is, in a sense, fantastic;
it is a series of landscapes, passions, and cataclysms such as never
were on earth, and never will be. If you are seriously interested only
in what belongs to earth you will not be seriously interested in
Shelley. Literature, according to Matthew Arnold, should be criticism
of life, and Shelley did not criticise life; so that his poetry had no
solidity. But is life, we may ask, the same thing as the circumstances
of life on earth? Is the spirit of life, that marks and judges those
circumstances, itself nothing? Music is surely no description of the
circumstances of life; yet it is relevant to life unmistakably, for it
stimulates by means of a torrent of abstract movements and images the
formal and emotional possibilities of living which lie in the spirit.
By so doing music becomes a part of life, a congruous addition, a
parallel life, as it were, to the vulgar one. I see no reason, in the
analogies of the natural world, for supposing that the circumstances
of human life are the only circumstances in which the spirit of life
can disport itself. Even on this planet, there are sea-animals and
air-animals, ephemeral beings and self-centred beings, as well as
persons who can grow as old as Matthew Arnold, and be as fond as he
was of classifying other people. And beyond this planet, and in the
interstices of what our limited senses can perceive, there are
probably many forms of life not criticised in any of the books which
Matthew Arnold said we should read in order to know the best that has
been thought and said in the world. The future, too, even among men,
may contain, as Shelley puts it, many "arts, though unimagined, yet to
be." The divination of poets cannot, of course, be expected to reveal
any of these hidden regions as they actually exist or will exist; but
what would be the advantage of revealing them? It could only be what
the advantage of criticising human life would be also, to improve
subsequent life indirectly by turning it towards attainable goods, and
is it not as important a thing to improve life directly and in the
present, if one has the gift, by enriching r