Shelley had a horror of tradition and prejudice; yet a certain amount of prejudice is necessary. A man who would solve all the problems of life without falling back on tradition would be obliged, in each of the decisions that he would make, to follow a line of thought or argumentation which would impose an intolerable burden on him. According to Shelley, the morality of an act is to be measured by the utilitarian standard, “the greatest good of the greatest number.” How though can we measure the pleasure and the pain that flows from an action? In many cases we must take the judgment of the race; we must be guided by prejudice or tradition. “Prejudice,” writes Burke, “is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.”[198]
The radical lays too much stress on the influence of institutions. Shelley ascribed to them all the evils of society. He was confident that a remodelling of them would bring about a complete reformation of society. Social wrongs are caused by men and men alone can cure them.
The radical is so taken up with his own ideas that he soon becomes eccentric. He loses, too, all sense of humor. He sees nothing but tragedy confronting him at every turn. At Leghorn, Shelley, accompanied by a friend, visited a ship which was manned by Greek sailors. “Does this realize your idea of Hellenism, Shelley?” his friend asked. “No! but it does of hell,” he replied. Almost every radical is lacking in tact, in moderation and in the sense of practical life.
The radical is apt to think that everybody is against him. He does not credit his opponents with honest convictions, and so he imagines that he is being unjustly persecuted. Shelley thought that even his father sought to injure him. “The idea,” Peacock writes, “that his father was continually on the watch for a pretext to lock him up haunted him through life.”
This brings us to several of Shelley’s traits which are characteristic of genius or insanity rather than of radicalism. In his Man of Genius Professor Lombroso says that the characteristics of insane men of genius are met with, though far less conspicuously, among the great men freest from any suspicion of insanity. “Between the physiology of the man of genius,” he writes, “and the pathology of the insane, there are many points of coincidence; there is even actual continuity.”
One of the most important of these characteristics is hallucination. Examples of geniuses who were subject to hallucinations are Caesar, Brutus, Cellini, Napoleon, Dr. Johnson, and Pope. Shortly before his death Shelley saw a child rise from the sea and clap its hands. At Tanyralt, on the night of February 26, 1813, Shelley imagined that he heard a noise proceeding from one of the parlors and immediately went downstairs armed with two pistols. There, he said, he found a man who fired at him but missed. The report of Shelley’s pistol brought the rest of the family on the scene, but none of them could find any trace of the intruder. It is generally conceded that this attack took place only in Shelley’s fertile imagination. At another time Shelley imagined that he was afflicted with elephantiasis. One day towards the close of 1813 he was traveling in a coach with a fat old lady, who, he felt sure, must be a victim of this disease. Later on at Mr. Newton’s house as “he was sitting in an arm chair,” writes Madame Gatayes, “talking to my father and mother, he suddenly slipped down on the ground, twisting about like an eel. ‘What is the matter?’ cried my mother. In his impressive tone Shelley announced ‘I have the elephantiasis.’... After a few weeks this hallucination left him as suddenly as it came.
“He took strange caprices,” writes Hogg, “unfounded frights and dislikes, vain apprehensions and panic terrors and therefore he absented himself from formal and sacred engagements.” It is well to keep this in mind when reading some of the criticism of Shelley. J. C. Jeafferson cites a long list of facts to prove that Shelley was a wilful prevaricator. Almost all of these can be explained away through the assumption that Shelley himself was deceived when he told something that did not square with the known facts of the case. “Had he,” writes Hogg, “written to ten different individuals the history of some proceeding in which he was himself a party and an eye-witness each of his ten reports would have varied from the rest in essential and important circumstances.”
“Genius,” says Lombroso, “is conscious of itself, appreciates itself, and certainly has no monkish humility.” Shelley often expressed regret that the rest of mankind was not as good as himself and his soulmate, Miss Hitchener. He thought that he had no faults.
Another characteristic of the genius is that he must be continually traveling from one place to another. This is certainly true of Shelley. He seldom remained longer than a year in one place.
Shelley in common with most sane men of genius was much preoccupied with his own ego. He loved to talk and write about himself and his opinions. The most important of his poems contain pictures of himself.