The radical is gifted with a powerful constructive imagination. He feels keenly the failures of institutions and is led to construct an ideal state of society. He takes all the good he knows, joins the pieces together, beautifies and adorns the picture until he has formed an earthly paradise. This has its advantages as only those whose imaginations are fired by fine ideals will ever stir the world with noble deeds. To succeed you must, as Emerson expresses it, “hitch your wagon to a star.”
Imagination has, of course, its dangers. Some are content to day dream; to live in the world of their imagination. They are impatient of the failures, of the slow, steady toil that precedes success. They forget that change works slowly. “He who has a clear grasp of a concrete ideal and a clear insight into the conditions, realization, and the difficulties in the actual world by which it is beset will be the true social reformer of the world.”[204] Shelley had a good grasp of the ideal, but he did not know how to cross over from the ideal to the real. This journey is a long and tedious one. “All progress,” MacKenzie writes, “which is guided by an ideal must be more or less of the nature of a stumble.”[205] “Our very walking,” as Goethe puts it, “is a series of falls.” Bacon writes, “certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man’s mind move in charity, rest in Providence, and turn upon the poles of the earth.” Shelley’s mind moved in charity, but turned anywhere except upon the poles of the earth.
Notwithstanding all its shortcomings radicalism fulfils a very useful purpose in society. It keeps before our eyes the ideal. “It emphasizes the moral over the material; man over property. Its prominence in society insures progress and gives promise that ideals shall not perish; that hope shall not wane, and that society shall long for perfection and peace, without which longing no progress is possible.”[206] Radicalism emphasizes the ideal; conservatism the real. Out of the two springs progress. “One is the moving power; the other the steadying power of the state. One is the sail without which society would make no progress; the other the ballast without which there would be small safety in a tempest.”[207]
It is strange that the experience of centuries has not taught men to be more tolerant towards the radical. We see how blind was the generation behind us in resisting the obvious reforms which it was asked to approve; yet it never enters our heads to suspect that the next generation will consider as obvious reforms what we consider subversive proposals, and will wonder at our stupidity in having offered any resistance to them.
Shelley was a “sentimental” rather than a “philosophical”[208] radical. He inflamed wills rather than enlightened minds. He roused men to action instead of solving difficult problems.
Man is influenced more by his emotions than by his intellect and hence the importance of the position which the sentimental radical holds in the history of society. If the radical arouses helpful emotions the amount of good he does is incalculable, so too is the amount of harm an unwise radical is responsible for.
The emotions which Shelley’s poetry arouse are on the whole helpful. True a few of the details of one or two of his works should be condemned, but these usually serve to bring out the main idea of the work which is always an inspiring one. Nobody thinks of condemning “Lear” because of the vileness of Goneril. If we would interpret any writer’s meaning and message the first thing to attend to is to regard the work “as a whole bearing on life as a whole.” Doing this we will grasp what is central, and at the same time will appreciate the true value of all details. Francis Thompson does not believe that any one ever had his faith shaken through reading Shelley. He knows, too, only of three passages to which exception might be taken from a moral point of view. Shelley extolled Justice, Freedom and Equality; and he denounced tyranny and injustice. His poetry should inspire men to be more charitable and tolerant, to seek less after wealth and the applause of the world, to sympathize more and more with suffering humanity, to return good for evil and to pursue the common good of all with more zeal and enthusiasm.
One or more of the faculties of every poet are more highly developed than those of ordinary people. In some cases it is the senses; in others the imagination. Tennyson and Wordsworth are good examples of the first class. They note and describe shades of color—in flowers, in the sky—the music of waters, and a hundred other things that escape the notice of common mortals. In Shelley it is his imagination, his faculty for feeling the sufferings of others that is abnormal. He sees a woman afflicted with elephantiasis, and straightway imagines that he himself has the same disease. Shelley keenly feels the misery around him, gives expression to that feeling, and castigates the causes of that misery.
Shelley’s poetry exercises our imagination, takes us away from ourselves and makes us think about our neighbors. The great trouble with the world today is that men think only about themselves, their own wants and their own joys. If we were made to feel the sufferings of the poor one-half of the evils of society would be eliminated. Anything then that brings home to us the evils of society is a blessing. “Every grade of culture,” writes Dr. Kerby, “has its own spirit of fellowship, its own code, understanding and secrets. Hence it is that the imagination has a supreme rôle in the neighborly relations of men. As social processes unite men in imagination, they supply the basis of concord, service and trust.... Reason may talk of social solidarity, and economic or sociological analysis may show us how intimately all men are united; the catechism may appeal to intellect and tell us that mankind of every description is our neighbor. But only they have entrance to our hearts to whom imagination gives the passport; only they are neighbors whom imagination accepts and embraces.”[209] The work of reconstructing human brotherhood is in a great measure the work of the imagination.
The objection may be raised here that although Shelley’s imagination was very strong, still he was guilty of great wrong to Harriet. In reply one may say that the imagination is only one-half the mould which forms the perfect man. The other half is made up of reason and revealed religion. Where these two parts of the mind are found together we get great men. They exist side by side in the saints. A man may know all about ascetical theology, or all about his profession, but if he has not imagination he will always be a plodder. To come more directly to our difficulty, Shelley had the motive power of imagination and the guiding force of reason, but not that of revealed religion. The result was that he went off at a tangent when he dealt with matrimony. His case should be a convincing argument to women at least that Christianity is necessary for the happiness and well-being of mankind. In so far as Shelley’s imagination was guided by the light of reason, he was a saint. Trelawny says that Shelley stinted himself to bare necessities, and then often lavished the money saved by unprecedented self-denial on selfish fellows who denied themselves nothing.