Nothing could be more absurd than to call Shelley a Pantheist. Pantheism is the creed of conservatism and resignation. Shelley felt the world as struggle and revolt, and like all the poets, he used Heaven as the vast canvas on which to paint with a demonic brush an heroic idealisation of what he saw below. It would be interesting to know whether any human heart, however stout and rebellious, when once it saw the cosmic process as struggle, has ever been able to think of the issue as uncertain. Certainly for Shelley there was never a doubt about the final triumph of good. Godwin qualified his agnosticism by supposing that there was a tendency in things (he would not call it spiritual, or endow it with mind) which somehow cooperates with us and assures the victory of life (see [p. 184]). One seems to meet this vague principle, this reverend Thing, in Shelley's Demogorgon, the shapeless, awful negation which overthrows the maleficent Jupiter, and with his fall inaugurates the golden age. The strange name of Demogorgon has probably its origin in the clerical error of some mediæval copyist, fumbling with the scholia of an anonymous grammarian. One can conceive that it appealed to Shelley's wayward fancy because it suggested none of the traditional theologies; and certainly it has a mysterious and venerable sound. Shelley can describe It only as Godwin describes his principle by a series of negatives.
I see a mighty darkness
Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom
Dart round, as light from the meridian sun,
Ungazed upon and shapeless; neither limb,
Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is
A living spirit.
It is the eternal X which the human spirit always assumes when it is at a loss to balance its equations. Demogorgon is, because if It were not, our strivings would be a battle in the mist, with no clear trumpet-note that promised triumph. Shelley, turning amid his singing to the supremest of all creative work, the making of a mythology, invents his God very much as those detested impostors, the primitive priests, had done. He gives Humanity a friendly Power as they had endowed their tribe with a god of battles. Humanity at grips with chaos is curiously like a nigger clan in the bush. It needs a fetish of victory. But a poet's mythology is to be judged by its fruits. A faith is worth the cathedral it builds. A myth is worth the poem it inspires.
If Shelley's ultimate view of reality is vague, a thing to be shadowed in myths and hinted in symbols, there is nothing indefinite in his view of the destinies of mankind. Here he marched behind Godwin, and Godwin hated vagueness. His intellect had assimilated all the steps in the argument for perfectibility. It emerges in places in its most dogmatic form. Institutions make us what we are, and to free us from their shackles is to liberate virtue and unleash genius. He pauses midway in the preface to Prometheus to assure us that, if England were divided into forty republics, each would produce philosophers and poets as great and numerous as those of Athens. The road to perfection, however, is not through revolution, but by the gradual extirpation of error. When he writes in prose, he expresses himself with all the rather affected intellectualism of the Godwinian psychology. "Revenge and retaliation," he remarks in the preface to The Cenci "are pernicious mistakes." But temperament counts for something even in a disciple so devout as Shelley. He had an intellectual view of the world; but, when once the rhythm of his musical verse had excited his mind to be itself, the force and simplicity of his emotion transfuse and transform these abstractions. Godwin's "universal benevolence" was with him an ardent affectionate love for his kind. Godwin's cold precept that it was the duty of an illuminated understanding to contribute towards the progress of enquiry, by arguing about perfection and the powers of the mind in select circles of friends who meet for debate, but never (virtue forbids) for action, became for him a zealous missionary call.
One smiles, with his irreverent yet admiring biographers, at the early escapades of the married boy—the visit to Dublin at the height of the agitation for Catholic emancipation, the printing of his Address to the Irish Nation, and his trick of scattering it by flinging copies from his balcony at passers-by, his quaint attempts to persuade grave Catholic noblemen that what they ought really to desire was a total and rapid transformation of the whole fabric of society, his efforts to found an association for the moral regeneration of mankind, and his elfish amusement of launching the truth upon the waters in the form of pamphlets sealed up in bottles. Shelley at this age perpetrated "rags" upon the universe, much as commonplace youths make hay of their fellows' rooms. It is amusing to read the solemn letters in which Godwin, complacently accepting the post of mentor, tells Shelley that he is much too young to reform the world, urges him to acquire a vicarious maturity by reading history, and refers him to Political Justice passim for the arguments which demonstrate the error of any attempt to improve mankind by forming political associations.
It is questionable how far the world has to thank Godwin for dissuading ardent young men from any practical effort to realise their ideals. It is just conceivable that, if the generation which hailed him as prophet had been stimulated by him to do something more than fold its hands in an almost superstitious veneration for the Slow Approach of Truth, there might have arisen under educated leaders some movement less class-bound than Whig Reform, less limited than the Corn Law agitation, and more intelligent than Chartism. But, if politics lost by Godwin's quietism, literature gained. It was Godwin's mission in life to save poets from Botany Bay; he rescued Shelley, as he had rescued Southey and Coleridge. It was by scattering his pity and his sympathy on every living creature around him, and squandering his fortune and his expectations in charity, while he dodged the duns and lived on bread and tea, that Shelley followed in action the principles of universal benevolence. Godwin omitted the beasts; but Shelley, practising vegetarianism and buying crayfish in order to return them to the river, realised the "boast" of the poet in Alastor:—
If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast
I consciously have injured, but still loved
And cherished these my kindred—
We hear of his gifts of blankets to the poor lace-makers at Marlow, and meet him stumbling home barefoot in mid-winter because he had given his boots to a poor woman.
Perhaps the most characteristic picture of this aspect of Shelley is Leigh Hunt's anecdote of a scene on Hampstead Heath. Finding a poor woman in a fit on the top of the Heath, Shelley carries her in his arms to the lighted door of the nearest house, and begs for shelter. The householder slams it in his face, with an "impostors swarm everywhere," and a "Sir, your conduct is extraordinary."
"Sir," cried Shelley, "I am sorry to say that your conduct is not extraordinary.... It is such men as you who madden the spirits and the patience of the poor and wretched; and if ever a convulsion comes in this country (which is very probable), recollect what I tell you. You will have your house, that you refuse to put this miserable woman into, burnt over your head."