Lovers of the ideal who thus hastily believe in its reality are called idealists, and Shelley was an idealist in almost every sense of that hard-used word.  He early became an idealist after Berkeley’s fashion, in that he discredited the existence of matter and embraced a psychological or (as it was called) intellectual system of the universe.  In his drama Hellas he puts this view with evident approval into the mouth of Ahasuerus: 

                    “This whole
    Of suns and worlds and men and beasts and flowers,
    With all the silent or tempestuous workings
    By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
    Is but a vision;—­all that it inherits
    Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams. 
    Thought is its cradle and its grave; nor less
    The future and the past are idle shadows
    Of thought’s eternal flight—­they have no being: 
    Nought is but that which feels itself to be.”

But Shelley was even more deeply and constantly an idealist after the manner of Plato; for he regarded the good as a magnet (inexplicably not working for the moment) that draws all life and motion after it; and he looked on the types and ideals of things as on eternal realities that subsist, beautiful and untarnished, when the glimmerings that reveal them to our senses have died away.  From the infinite potentialities of beauty in the abstract, articulate mind draws certain bright forms—­the Platonic ideas—­“the gathered rays which are reality,” as Shelley called them:  and it is the light of these ideals cast on objects of sense that lends to these objects some degree of reality and value, making out of them “lovely apparitions, dim at first, then radiant ... the progeny immortal of painting, sculpture, and rapt poesy.”

The only kind of idealism that Shelley had nothing to do with is the kind that prevails in some universities, that Hegelian idealism which teaches that perfect good is a vicious abstraction, and maintains that all the evil that has been, is, and ever shall be is indispensable to make the universe as good as it possibly could be.  In this form, idealism is simply contempt for all ideals, and a hearty adoration of things as they are; and as such it appeals mightily to the powers that be, in church and in state; but in that capacity it would have been as hateful to Shelley as the powers that be always were, and as the philosophy was that flattered them.  For his moral feeling was based on suffering and horror at what is actual, no less than on love of a visioned good.  His conscience was, to a most unusual degree, at once elevated and sincere.  It was inspired in equal measure by prophecy and by indignation.  He was carried away in turn by enthusiasm for what his ethereal and fertile fancy pictured as possible, and by detestation of the reality forced upon him instead.  Hence that extraordinary moral fervour which is the soul of his poetry.  His imagination is no playful undirected kaleidoscope;