but carried away by intensity of desire.  It may seem a curious image, but one cannot help feeling that if Shelley had been contemporary with and brought into contact with Christ, he would have been an ardent follower and disciple, and would have been regarded with a deep tenderness and love; his sins would have been swiftly forgiven.  I do not wish to minimise them; he behaved ungratefully, inconsiderately, wilfully.  His usage of his first wife is a deep blot on his character.  But in spite of his desertion of her, and his abduction of Mary Godwin, his life was somehow an essentially innocent one.  It is possible to paint his career in dark colours; it is impossible to say that his example is an inspiring one; he is the kind of character that society is almost bound to take precautions against; he was indifferent to social morality, he was regardless of truth, neglectful of commercial honesty; but for all that one feels more hopeful about the race that can produce a Shelley.  We must be careful not to condone his faults in the light of his poetical genius; but for all that, if Shelley had never written a line of his exquisite poetry, I cannot help feeling that if one had known him, one would have felt the same eager regard for him.  One cannot draw near to a personality by a process of logic.  But one fact emerges.  There is little doubt that one of the most oppressive, injurious, detestable forces in the world is the force of conventionality, that instinct which makes men judge a character and an action, not by its beauty or by its merits, but by comparing it with the standard of how the normal man would regard it.  This vast and intolerable medium of dulness, which penetrates our lives like a thick, dark mist, allowing us only to see the object in range of our immediate vision, hostile to all originality, crushingly respectable, that dictates our hours, our occupations, our amusements, our emotions, our religion, is the most ruthless and tyrannical thing in the world.  Against this Shelley fought with all his might; his error was to hate it so intensely as to fail to see the few grains of gold, the few principles of kindness, of honesty, of consideration, of soberness, that it contains.  He paid dearly for his error, in the consciousness of the contempt and infamy which were heaped upon his quivering spirit.  But he did undoubtedly love truth, beauty, and purity.  One has to get on the right side of his sins and indulgences, his grotesque political theories, his inconsistencies; but when once one has apprehended the real character, one is never in any doubt again.

XLVII