But to exaggerate good is to vivify, to enhance our sense of moral coherence and beautiful naturalness; it is to render things more graceful, intelligible, and congenial to the spirit which they ought to serve.  To aggravate evil, on the contrary, is to darken counsel—­already dark enough—­and the want of truth to nature in this pessimistic sort of exaggeration is not compensated for by any advantage.  The violence and, to my feeling, the wantonness of these invectives—­for they are invectives in intention and in effect—­may have seemed justified to Shelley by his political purpose.  He was thirsting to destroy kings, priests, soldiers, parents, and heads of colleges—­to destroy them, I mean, in their official capacity; and the exhibition of their vileness in all its diabolical purity might serve to remove scruples in the half-hearted.  We, whom the nineteenth century has left so tender to historical rights and historical beauties, may wonder that a poet, an impassioned lover of the beautiful, could have been such a leveller, and such a vandal in his theoretical destructiveness.  But here the legacy of the eighteenth century was speaking in Shelley, as that of the nineteenth is speaking in us:  and moreover, in his own person, the very fertility of imagination could be a cause of blindness to the past and its contingent sanctities.  Shelley was not left standing aghast, like a Philistine, before the threatened destruction of all traditional order.  He had, and knew he had, the seeds of a far lovelier order in his own soul; there he found the plan or memory of a perfect commonwealth of nature ready to rise at once on the ruins of this sad world, and to make regret for it impossible.

So much for what I take to be the double foundation of Shelley’s genius, a vivid love of ideal good on the one hand, and on the other, what is complementary to that vivid love, much suffering and horror at the touch of actual evils.  On this double foundation he based an opinion which had the greatest influence on his poetry, not merely on the subject-matter of it, but also on the exuberance and urgency of emotion which suffuses it.  This opinion was that all that caused suffering and horror in the world could be readily destroyed:  it was the belief in perfectibility.  An animal that has rigid instincts and an a priori mind is probably very imperfectly adapted to the world he comes into:  his organs cannot be moulded by experience and use; unless they are fitted by some miraculous pre-established harmony, or by natural selection, to things as they are, they will never be reconciled with them, and an eternal war will ensue between what the animal needs, loves, and can understand and what the outer reality offers.  So long as such a creature lives—­and his life will be difficult and short—­events will continually disconcert and puzzle him; everything will seem to him unaccountable, inexplicable, unnatural.  He will not be able to conceive the real order and connection