CHAPTER III
POLITICS
Someone has said that if Shelley had not been a poet he would have been a politician. Certain it is that he gave to politics a great deal of thought and study. On January 26, 1819, Shelley wrote to Peacock: “I consider poetry very subordinate to political science, and, if I were well, certainly I would aspire to the latter, for I can conceive a great work embodying the discoveries of all ages, and harmonizing the contending creeds by which mankind have been ruled.”[82] Shelley was not one who
beheld the woe
In which mankind was bound, and deem’d that fate
Which made them abject, would preserve them so.
On the contrary, he firmly believed in man’s capacity to work out his own regeneration. His tuneful lyre was ever at the service of the Goddess of Freedom; and he took occasion often to pour forth music calculated to rouse the nations from their apathy.
Very many of Shelley’s views on political and social questions can be traced to Godwin’s Political Justice. Godwin doubts that one can be said to have a mind. It may still be convenient to use the word “mind,” but in fact what we know by that name is merely a chain of “ideas.” Since man’s mind is but an aggregate of ideas, man himself is capable of indefinite modification. Differences in men result wholly from differences of education. Feed a sinner on syllogisms and you can transform him into a saint. It is impossible for one to resist a clear exposition of the advantages of virtue. It follows, too, that we can easily abolish existing institutions and rearrange the whole structure of society on new principles infallibly correct. The force which is to spur us on to do this is reason. It is “omnipotent.”
Volney, Rousseau, Holbach, and the rest of this stamp, although condemning past systems of government, admitted that some form of government was necessary for the well-being of mankind. Godwin, on the other hand, denounced all government as “an institution of the most pernicious tendency.” There is only one power to which man should yield obedience and that is the decision of his own understanding. Conditions being such as they are, government may be required for a while to restrain and direct men, but as soon as men will learn to follow reason, government will disappear altogether.
Godwin taught that every voluntary action flows solely from the decision of one’s judgment. “Voluntary actions of men originate in all cases in their opinions,” i. e., in the state of their minds immediately previous to those actions. The nature of a man’s actions, therefore, depends on the nature of his opinions. If he has just and true opinions his actions will be good; if erroneous ones, his actions will be bad. But “sound reasoning and truth adequately communicated must be victorious over error.”[83] Man will always accept the truth if presented to him properly. It follows, then, that “reason and conviction appear to be the proper instruments for regulating the actions of mankind.” Man’s conduct should not conform to any other standard but reason. Obedience to law then is immoral, unless of course its mandates correspond to the decision of our own judgments. Shelley has the same idea
The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys,
Power, like a devastating pestilence
Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Make slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.[84]
Again and again he exclaims against kings and autocracy. His sonnet, “England in 1819,” is a terrible castigation of the Hanoverian Kings: