towards
the universe, what a flood of evil could be dammed; the slightness
of the cause is as striking as the immensity of the effect. Those who
ridicule the young do not, perhaps, always see that this is perfectly
true, though of course they are right in denouncing the inference
so often drawn--and here lay Shelley's fundamental fallacy--that the
required tiny change depends on an effort of the will, and that the
will only does not make the effort because feeling is perverted
and intelligence dimmed by convention traditions, prejudices, and
superstitions. It is certain, for one thing, that will only plays a
small part in our nature, and that by themselves acts of will
cannot make the world perfect. Most men are helped to this lesson
by observation of themselves; they see that their high resolves are
ineffective because their characters are mixed. Shelley never learnt
this. He saw, indeed, that his efforts were futile even mischievous;
but, being certain, and rightly, of the nobility of his aims, he could
never see that he had acted wrongly, that he ought to have calculated
the results of his actions more reasonably. Ever thwarted, and never
nearer the happiness he desired for himself and others, he did not, like
ordinary men attain a juster notion of the relation between good and
ill in himself and in the world; he lapsed into a plaintive bewildered
melancholy, translating the inexplicable conflict of right and wrong
into the transcendental view that

"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity."

But his failure is the world's gain, for all that is best in his poetry
is this expression of frustrated hope. He has indeed, when he is moved
simply by public passion, some wonderful trumpet-notes; what hate and
indignation can do, he sometimes does. And his rapturous dreams of
freedom can stir the intellect, if not the blood. But it must be
remarked that poetry inspired solely by revolutionary enthusiasm is
liable to one fatal weakness: it degenerates too easily into rhetoric.
To avoid being a didactic treatise it has to deal in high-flown
abstractions, and in Shelley fear, famine, tyranny, and the rest,
sometimes have all the emptiness of the classical manner. They appear
now as brothers, now as parents, now as sisters of one another; the task
of unravelling their genealogy would be as difficult as it is pointless.
If Shelley had been merely the singer of revolution, the intensit