Such a spirit, preëminently, was Shelley; of whom, when the last word of disparagement has been said, or the undeniable truth, put into a phrase by Mr. Max Beerbohm, “a crystal crank,” the equally undeniable fact remains that Shelley suffered tortures over the woes of his fellow-creatures, while Byron (for a contrast) cares scarcely at all for the general woe surrounding him, everything for his own affliction in a world which had paid him tribute far above the earnings of common men, and yet not only (as Shelley does) casts the blame on tyrants and governments, but the cure for his egoistical troubles on political machinery, revolutions. I go on, taking names and illustrations almost at random. Contrast any Radical utterance of Tennyson’s—his Lady Clara Vere de Vere, for example—with poor Thomas Hood’s Song of the Shirt. Why, it fades away: Hood’s passionate charity simply withers up the other’s personal self-assertive inverted snobbery. If you have stuff in you, contrast the note of
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread
with the whine of Lady Clara Vere de Vere—
The grand old gardener and his wife
Laugh at the claims of long descent
—which is just
When Adam delved, and Eve span,