“These energetic intellects,” writes Lombroso, “are the true pioneers of science; they rush forward regardless of danger, facing with eagerness the greatest difficulties—perhaps because it is these which best satisfy their morbid energy.” Shelley was always embarking on some foolish enterprise. He ran away with a school girl without having in sight any means of support. He went to Ireland to emancipate the whole race; and after this failed he set about reclaiming a large tract of land from the sea at the little town of Tremadoc, Wales. He finally lost his life through venturing out to sea in stormy weather with an undermanned boat.[199]

Matthew Arnold’s dictum, then, that Shelley was not sane is a gross exaggeration. The characteristics of his life which would seem to uphold Arnold’s assertion are found in sane men of genius. That he was abnormal in some ways cannot be denied. In a letter which Mrs. Shelley wrote to Sir John Bowring when she sent him the holograph manuscript of the Mask of Anarchy, there is the following reference to her husband: “Do not be afraid of losing the impression you have concerning my lost Shelley by conversing with anyone who knows about him. The mysterious feeling you experience was participated by all his friends, even by me, who was ever with him—or why say even I felt it more than any other, because by sharing his fortune, I was more aware that any other of his wondrous excellencies and the strange fate which attended him on all occasions.... I do not in any degree believe that his being was regulated by the same laws that govern the existence of us common mortals, nor did anyone think so who ever knew him. I have endeavored, but how inadequately, to give some idea of him in my last published book—the sketch has pleased some of those who best loved him—I might have made more of it, but there are feelings which one recoils from unveiling to the public eye.”[200]

Shelley always remained a child. This was the opinion of one of his greatest admirers, Francis Thompson. “The child appeared no less often in Shelley the philosopher than in Shelley the idler. It is seen in his repellant no less than in his amiable weaknesses.” To this fact, perhaps, may be ascribed the luxuriance of his imagination; it is freer in childhood than in old age.

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy.
But he beholds the light and whence it flows
He sees it in his joy.[201]

He has been described as “a beautiful spirit building his many-colored haze of words and images.” For him idealism was more than a need of the spirit; it was the principal element of his being.[202] Anyone who cleared away obstacles from the path of his imagination had all the attraction of a kindred spirit. This helps to explain Godwin’s influence over him. His father-in-law advocated the entire abolition of existing institutions, and left the work of reconstruction to man’s imagination. Here it was that Shelley found full scope for the exercise of his faculties. He cannot be said to have contributed many original ideas to nineteenth century literature. “He merely familiarizes the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence.”

Radicalism is a characteristic of youth. Almost every person who is of any importance in his community will be found to have started out in life, boiling over with enthusiasm and eager to help on reform by advocating a change in this or that institution. Very often this interferes with their judgment. Bacon had this in mind when he wrote: “Is not the opinion of Aristotle worthy to be regarded wherein he saith that young men are not fit auditors of moral philosophy, because they are not settled from the boiling-heat of their affections nor tempered with time and experience.”[203] Shakespeare endorses this in Troilus and Cressida, Act II, scene 2.

not much
Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought
Unfit to hear moral philosophy.

That Shelley, had he lived, would have followed in the footsteps of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey and become a conservative may well be doubted. However, his life shows some progress in that direction. He had learned to become more tolerant of various types of men; and Stopford Brooke maintains that there are indications in Shelley’s works to show that he would have become a Christian.

It is unfortunate that Shelley never came into close personal contact with a Burke who could take him out of the region of imagination and make him appreciate the beauty of order and institutions. Had Shelley met such a one he might have been influenced in the way that the Greek Augustine was benefited by the Roman Ambrose. Southey might have helped Shelley if he had shown more consideration for our poet’s extremely sensitive feelings. Southey’s pet argument was that Shelley was too young to understand the question they were discussing. “When you are as old as I am,” he would say, “then you will see things in a different light.” Such a line of reasoning has no influence on men of Shelley’s stamp.

Aubrey De Vere, in a letter to Henry Taylor, December 12, 1882, states that Shelley’s character had two great natural defects. The first was a want of robustness which took away from him stability and self-possession. The second was his want of reverence. “There is,” he writes, “an insolence of audacity in some passages of Shelley on religious subjects which admits only of two interpretations, viz., something in his original cerebral organization doubtless augmented by circumstances that hindered proper development in some part of it or else pride in quite an extraordinary degree.” Lest this should appear to give De Vere’s complete view of Shelley I quote further from the same letter. “Something angelic there was certainly about him, something that I recognized from the first day that I read his poetry. His intelligence had also a keen logic about it.”