How shall we reconcile these conflicting impressions?  Shall we force ourselves to call the genius of Shelley second rate because it was revolutionary, and shall we attribute all enthusiasm for him to literary affectation or political prejudice?  Or shall we rather abandon the orthodox principle that an important subject-matter and a sane spirit are essential to great works?  Or shall we look for a different issue out of our perplexity, by asking if the analysis and comprehension are not perhaps at fault which declare that these things are not present in Shelley’s poetry?  This last is the direction in which I conceive the truth to lie.  A little consideration will show us that Shelley really has a great subject-matter—­what ought to be; and that he has a real humanity—­though it is humanity in the seed, humanity in its internal principle, rather than in those deformed expressions of it which can flourish in the world.

Shelley seems hardly to have been brought up; he grew up in the nursery among his young sisters, at school among the rude boys, without any affectionate guidance, without imbibing any religious or social tradition.  If he received any formal training or correction, he instantly rejected it inwardly, set it down as unjust and absurd, and turned instead to sailing paper boats, to reading romances or to writing them, or to watching with delight the magic of chemical experiments.  Thus the mind of Shelley was thoroughly disinherited; but not, like the minds of most revolutionists, by accident and through the niggardliness of fortune, for few revolutionists would be such if they were heirs to a baronetcy.  Shelley’s mind disinherited itself out of allegiance to itself, because it was too sensitive and too highly endowed for the world into which it had descended.  It rejected ordinary education, because it was incapable of assimilating it.  Education is suitable to those few animals whose faculties are not completely innate, animals that, like most men, may be perfected by experience because they are born with various imperfect alternative instincts rooted equally in their system.  But most animals, and a few men, are not of this sort.  They cannot be educated, because they are born complete.  Full of predeterminate intuitions, they are without intelligence, which is the power of seeing things as they are.  Endowed with a specific, unshakable faith, they are impervious to experience:  and as they burst the womb they bring ready-made with them their final and only possible system of philosophy.

Shelley was one of these spokesmen of the a priori, one of these nurslings of the womb, like a bee or a butterfly; a dogmatic, inspired, perfect, and incorrigible creature.  He was innocent and cruel, swift and wayward, illuminated and blind.  Being a finished child of nature, not a joint product, like most of us, of nature, history, and society, he abounded miraculously in his own clear sense, but was obtuse to the droll,