Worse?
Fury.
In each human heart terror survives
The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear,
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.
The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want—worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.
And all best things are thus confused to ill.
Many are strong and rich, and would be just,
But live among their suffering fellow-men
As if none felt; they know not what they do.
Shelley so separated the good and evil in the world, that he was presently vexed as acutely as any theist with the problem of accounting for evil. Paine felt no difficulty in his sharp, positive mind. He traced all the wrongs of society to the egoism of priests and kings; and, since he did not assume the fundamental goodness of human nature, it troubled none of his theories to accept the crude primitive fact of self-interest. What Shelley would really have said in answer to a question about the origin of evil, if we had found him in a prosaic mood, it is hard to guess, and the speculation does not interest us. Shelley's prose opinions were of no importance. What we do trace in his poetry is a tendency, half conscious, uttering itself only in figures and parables, to read the riddle of the universe as a struggle between two hostile principles. In the world of prose he called himself an atheist. He rejoiced in the name, and used it primarily as a challenge to intolerance. "It is a good word of abuse to stop discussion," he said once to his friend Trelawny, "a painted devil to frighten the foolish, a threat to intimidate the wise and good. I used it to express my abhorrence of superstition. I took up the word as a knight takes up a gauntlet in defiance of injustice."
Shelley was an atheist because Christians used the name of God to sanctify persecution. That was really his ultimate emotional reason. His mythology, when he came to paint the world in myths, was Manichean. His creed was an ardent dualism, in which a God and an anti-God contend and make history. But in his mood of revolt it suited him to confuse the names and the symbols. The snake is everywhere in his poems the incarnation of good, and if we ask why, there is probably no other reason than that the Hebrew mythology against which he revolted, had taken it as the symbol of evil. The legitimate Gods in his Pantheon are always in the wrong. He belongs to the cosmic party of opposition, and the Jupiter of his Prometheus is morally a temporarily omnipotent devil. Like Godwin he felt that the God of orthodoxy was a "tyrant," and he revolted against Him, because he condemned the world which He had made.
The whole point of view, as it concerns Christian theology, is stated with a bitter clearness, in the speech of Ahasuerus in Queen Mab. The first Canto of the Revolt of Islam puts the position of dualism without reserve:
Know, then, that from the depths of ages old
Two Powers o'er mortal things dominion hold,
Ruling the world with a divided lot,
Immortal, all-pervading, manifold,
Twin Genii, equal Gods—when life and thought
Sprang forth, they burst the womb of inessential Nought.
The good principle was the Morning Star (as though to remind us of Lucifer) until his enemy changed him to the form of a snake. The anti-God, whom men worship blindly as God, holds sway over our world. Terror, madness, crime, and pain are his creation, and Asia in Prometheus cries aloud—
Utter his name: a world pining in pain
Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down.
In the sublime mythology of Prometheus the war of God and anti-God is seen visibly, making the horrors of history. As Jupiter's Furies rend the heart of the merciful Titan chained to his rock on Caucasus, murders and crucifixions are enacted in the world below. The mythical cruelties in the clouds are the shadows of man's sufferings below; and they are also the cause. A mystical parallelism links the drama in Heaven with the tragedy on earth; we suffer from the malignity of the World's Ruler, and triumph by the endurance of Man's Saviour.