An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king;
Princes the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn—mud from a muddy spring,
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop blind in blood without a blow, etc., etc.
To aid republicanism he espoused the cause of the unhappy Caroline of Brunswick and on her account wrote “A New National Anthem,” and the satirical piece, “Swellfoot the Tyrant.” In “Hellas” we find him advocating the cause of Greece, and it is believed that this poem moved his friend Byron to take up arms in defense of that country.
“A king,” writes Godwin, “is necessarily and unavoidably a despot in his heart.” With him the words “ruler” and “tyrant” are synonymous. A king from the very nature of his office cannot be anything but vicious. Shelley expresses his opinion of kings as follows:
The king, the wearer of a gilded chain
That binds his soul to abjectness, the fool
Whom courtiers nickname monarch, whilst a slave
Even to the basest appetites.[85]
One wonders at first why Shelley should have represented evil as an eagle in The Revolt of Islam. The reason for this becomes clear when one considers that the eagle is often called a king among birds and is used as a symbol for authority.
Shelley, however, did not believe in violent revolutions. In The Revolt of Islam, Irish pamphlets, &c., he advocates reformation without recourse to force. A change must take place; kings must be done away with, but not until the people are prepared for the change. “A pure republic,” he writes, “may be shown, by inferences the most obvious and irresistible, to be that system of social order the fittest to produce the happiness and promote the genuine eminence of man. Yet nothing can less consist with reason or afford smaller hopes of any beneficial issue than the plan which should abolish the regal and the aristocratical branches of our constitution, before the public mind, through many gradations of improvement, shall have arrived at the maturity which shall disregard these symbols of its childhood.”
Godwin and Shelley maintain that the state should make as little use as possible of coercion and violence. “Criminals should be pitied and reformed, not detested and punished.” The punishment of death is particularly obnoxious to them. Shelley argues against it in his essay on The Punishment of Death. He claims that the punishment of death defeats its own end. It is a triumphant exhibition of suffering virtue, which may inspire some with pity, admiration and sympathy. As a consequence it may incite them to emulate their works, especially the works of political agitators. Punishment of death, again, excites those emotions which are inimical to social order. It strengthens all the inhuman and unsocial impulses of man. The contempt of human life breeds ferocity of manners and contempt of social ties. Hence it is, Shelley believes, that those nations in which the penal code has been particularly mild have been distinguished from all others by the rarity of crime.
Neither should the citizens of a state use violence in putting down oppression. In his address to the Irish he tells them that violence and folly will serve only to delay emancipation. “Mildness, sobriety, and reason are the effectual methods of forwarding the ends of liberty and happiness.” Violence and falsehood will produce nothing but wretchedness and slavery and will make those who use them incapable of further exertion. Violence will immediately render their cause a bad one. Godwin likewise maintains that “force is an expedient the use of which is much to be deplored. It is contrary to the nature of intellect which cannot be improved but by conviction and persuasion. It corrupts the man that employs it and the man upon whom it is employed.”[86] In The Revolt of Islam Shelley says:
Oh wherefore should ill ever flow from ill,
And pain still keener pain forever breed?
We are all brethren—even the slaves who kill
For hire are men; and to avenge misdeed
On the misdoer doth but misery feed
With her own broken heart![87]
Godwin would reform society by means of education, so also would Shelley. They seem to differ though in their views with regard to the relations that exist between institutions and individuals. Godwin holds that tyrranical institutions must be abolished before men can become free. Shelley, on the contrary, says that the freedom and enlightenment of individuals should come first, and it is only when that is accomplished that tyrannical institutions will disappear. Godwin writes: “The only method according to which social improvements can be carried on is when the improvement of our institutions advances in a just proportion to the illumination of the public understanding.”[88] While Shelley writes in his address to the Irish people that reform “is founded on the reform of private men and without individual amendment it is vain and foolish to expect the amendment of a state or government.” Although Godwin says in the first book of Political Justice that it is futile to attempt to change morals without first changing our institutions, still, later on, he seems to forget this and to advocate the reform of individuals. “Make men wise,” he writes, “and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this.”[89] Shelley, unlike Plato, would give to poets the first place in his plan for the reform of society. He calls them “the acknowledged legislators of the world.”[90]