In him, as in many people, too intense a need of loving excludes the capacity for intelligent sympathy.  His feeling cannot accommodate itself to the inequalities of human nature:  his good will is a geyser, and will not consent to grow cool, and to water the flat and vulgar reaches of life.  Shelley is blind to the excellences of what he despises, as he is blind to the impossibility of realising what he wants.  His sympathies are narrow as his politics are visionary, so that there is a certain moral incompetence in his moral intensity.  Yet his abstraction from half of life, or from nine-tenths of it, was perhaps necessary if silence and space were to be won in his mind for its own upwelling, ecstatic harmonies.  The world we have always with us, but such spirits we have not always.  And the spirit has fire enough within to make a second stellar universe.

An instance of Shelley’s moral incompetence in moral intensity is to be found in his view of selfishness and evil.  From the point of view of pure spirit, selfishness is quite absurd.  As a contemporary of ours has put it:  “It is so evident that it is better to secure a greater good for A than a lesser good for B that it is hard to find any still more evident principle by which to prove this.  And if A happens to be some one else, and B to be myself, that cannot affect the question.”  It is very foolish not to love your neighbour as yourself, since his good is no less good than yours.  Convince people of this—­and who can resist such perfect logic?—­and presto all property in things has disappeared, all jealousy in love, and all rivalry in honour.  How happy and secure every one will suddenly be, and how much richer than in our mean, blind, competitive society!  The single word love—­and we have just seen that love is a logical necessity—­offers an easy and final solution to all moral and political problems.  Shelley cannot imagine why this solution is not accepted, and why logic does not produce love.  He can only wonder and grieve that it does not; and since selfishness and ill-will seem to him quite gratuitous, his ire is aroused; he thinks them unnatural and monstrous.  He could not in the least understand evil, even when he did it himself; all villainy seemed to him wanton, all lust frigid, all hatred insane.  All was an abomination alike that was not the lovely spirit of love.

Now this is a very unintelligent view of evil; and if Shelley had had time to read Spinoza—­an author with whom he would have found himself largely in sympathy—­he might have learned that nothing is evil in itself, and that what is evil in things is not due to any accident in creation, nor to groundless malice in man.  Evil is an inevitable aspect which things put on when they are struggling to preserve themselves in the same habitat, in which there is not room or matter enough for them to prosper equally side by side.  Under these circumstances the partial success of any creature—­say, the cancer-microbe—­is an evil from the point of view of those other creatures—­say, men—­to whom that success is a defeat.  Shelley sometimes half perceived this inevitable tragedy.  So he says of the fair lady in the Sensitive Plant: