While these poets were sitting at Godwin’s feet, Shelley was still a child.  But he came across Political Justice at Eton; in his later life he reread it almost every year; and when he married Godwin’s daughter he was more Godwinian than Godwin himself.  Hazlitt, writing in 1814, says that Godwin’s reputation had “sunk below the horizon,” but Shelley never ceased to believe in his theory, though he came to see that the regeneration of man would be a much slower process than he had at first imagined.  In the immature poem Queen Mab the philosophy of Godwin was behind his description of the future, and it was behind the longer and more ambitious poems of his maturer years.  The city of gold, of the Revolt of Islam, is Godwin’s future society, and he describes that poem as “an experiment on the temper of the public mind as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live.”  As to Prometheus Unbound his biographer observes:  [Footnote:  Dowden, ib. ii. p. 264.  Elsewhere Dowden remarks on the singular insensibility of Shelley’s mind “to the wisdom or sentiment of history” (i. p. 55).]

All the glittering fallacies of “Political Justice”—­now sufficiently tarnished—­together with all its encouraging and stimulating truths, may be found in the caput mortuum left when the critic has reduced the poetry of the “Prometheus” to a series of doctrinaire statements.

The same dream inspired the final chorus of Hellas.  Shelley was the poet of perfectibility.

8.

The attraction of perfectibility reached beyond the ranks of men of letters, and in Robert Owen, the benevolent millowner of Lanark, it had an apostle who based upon it a very different theory from that of Political Justice and became one of the founders of modern socialism.

The success of the idea of Progress has been promoted by its association with socialism. [Footnote:  The word was independently invented in England and France.  An article in the Poor Man’s Guardian (a periodical edited by H. Hetherington, afterwards by Bronterre O’Brien), Aug. 24, 1833, is signed “A Socialist”; and in 1834 socialisme is opposed to individualism by P. Leroux in an article in the Revue Encyclopedique.  The word is used in the New Moral World, and from 1836 was applied to the Owenites.  See Dolleans, Robert Owen (1907), p. 305.] The first phase of socialism, what has been called its sentimental phase, was originated by Saint-Simon in France and Owen in England at about the same time; Marx was to bring it down from the clouds and make it a force in practical politics.  But both in its earlier and in its later forms the economical doctrines rest upon a theory of society depending on the assumption, however disguised, that social institutions have been solely responsible for the vice and misery which exist, and that institutions and laws can be so changed as to abolish misery and vice.  That is pure eighteenth century doctrine; and it passed from the revolutionary doctrinaires of that period to the constructive socialists of the nineteenth century.