sed to reach the
final one.

Now Shelley never could have been a man, for he never was a boy. And the
reason lay in the persecution which overclouded his school-days. Of that
persecution's effect upon him, he has left us, in _The Revolt of Islam_,
a picture which to many or most people very probably seems a poetical
exaggeration; partly because Shelley appears to have escaped physical
brutality, partly because adults are inclined to smile tenderly at
childish sorrows which are not caused by physical suffering. That he
escaped for the most part bodily violence is nothing to the purpose. It
is the petty malignant annoyance recurring hour by hour, day by day,
month by month, until its accumulation becomes an agony; it is this which
is the most terrible weapon that boys have against their fellow boy, who
is powerless to shun it because, unlike the man, he has virtually no
privacy. His is the torture which the ancients used, when they anointed
their victim with honey and exposed him naked to the restless fever of
the flies. He is a little St. Sebastian, sinking under the incessant
flight of shafts which skilfully avoid the vital parts.

We do not, therefore, suspect Shelley of exaggeration: he was, no doubt,
in terrible misery. Those who think otherwise must forget their own
past. Most people, we suppose, _must_ forget what they were like when
they were children: otherwise they would know that the griefs of their
childhood were passionate abandonment, _dechirants_ (to use a
characteristically favourite phrase of modern French literature) as the
griefs of their maturity. Children's griefs are little, certainly; but
so is the child, so is its endurance, so is its field of vision, while
its nervous impressionability is keener than ours. Grief is a matter of
relativity; the sorrow should be estimated by its proportion to the
sorrower; a gash is as painful to one as an amputation to another. Pour
a puddle into a thimble, or an Atlantic into Etna; both thimble and
mountain overflow. Adult fools, would not the angels smile at our
griefs, were not angels too wise to smile at them?

So beset, the child fled into the tower of his own soul, and raised the
drawbridge. He threw out a reserve, encysted in which he grew to
maturity unaffected by the intercourses that modify the maturity of
others into the thing we call a man. The encysted child developed until
it reached years of virility, until those later Oxford days in w