It must have been about this very time that the law of England (quite content to regard the owner of the closed door as a virtuous citizen) decided that the Shelley who carried this poor stranger into shelter, fetched a doctor, and out of his own poverty relieved her direr need, was unfit to bring up his own children.
If Shelley allowed himself to be persuaded by Godwin to abandon his missionary adventures, he pursued the ideal in his poems. Whether by Platonic influence, or by the instinct of his own temperament, he moves half-consciously from the Godwinian notion that mankind are to be reasoned into perfection. The contemplation of beauty is with him the first stage in the progress towards reasoned virtue. "My purpose," he writes in the preface to Prometheus, "has been ... to familiarise ... poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that, until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life, which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness." It was for want of virtue, as Mary Wollstonecraft reflected, writing sadly after the Terror, that the French Revolution had failed. The lesson of all the horrors of oppression and reaction which Shelley described, the comfort of all the listening spirits who watch from their mental eyries the slow progress of mankind to perfection, the example of martyred patriots—these tend always to the moral which Demogorgon sums up at the end of the unflagging, unearthly beauties of the last triumphant act of Prometheus Unbound:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
To suffer, to forgive, to love, but above all, to defy—that was for Shelley the whole duty of man.
In two peculiarities, which he constantly emphasised, Shelley's view of progress differed at once from Godwin's conception, and from the notion of a slow evolutionary growth which the men of to-day consider historical he traced the impulse which is to lead mankind to perfection, to the magnetic leading of chosen and consecrated spirits. He saw the process of change not as a slow evolution (as moderns do), nor yet as the deliberate discarding of error at the bidding of rational argument (as Godwin did), but rather as a sudden emotional conversion. The missionary is always the light-bringer. "Some eminent in virtue shall start up," he prophesies in Queen Mab. The Revolt of Islam, so puzzling to the uninitiated reader by the wilful inversions of its mythology, and its history which seems to belong to no conceivable race of men, becomes, when one grasps its underlying ideas, a luminous epic of revolutionary faith, precious if only because it is told in that elaborately musical Spenserian stanza which no poet before or after Shelley has handled with such easy mastery. Their mission to free their countrymen comes to Laon and Cythna while they are still children, brooding over the slavery of modern Greece amid the ruins of a free past. They dream neither of teaching nor of fighting. They are the winged children of Justice and Truth, whose mere words can scatter the thrones of the oppressor, and trample the last altar in the dust. It is enough to speak the name of Liberty in a ship at sea, and all the coasts around it will thrill with the rumour of her name. In one moving, eloquent harangue, Cythna converts the sailors of the ship, laden with slaves and the gains of commerce, into the pioneers of her army. She paints to them the misery of their own lot, and then appeals to the central article of revolutionary faith:
This need not be; ye might arise and will
That gold should lose its power and thrones their glory.
That love which none may bind be free to fill
The world like light; and evil faith, grown hoary
With crime, be quenched and die.
"Ye might arise and will"—it was the inevitable corollary of the facile analysis which traced all the woes of mankind not to "nature," but to kings, priests, and institutions. Shelley's missionaries of liberty preach to a nation of slaves, as the apostles of the Salvation Army preach in the slums to creatures reared in degradation, the same mesmeric appeal. Conversion is a psychological possibility, and the history of revolutions teaches its limitations and its power as instructively as the history of religion. It breaks down not because men are incapable of the sudden effort that can "arise and will," but rather because to render its effects permanent, it must proceed to regiment the converts in organised associations, which speedily develop all the evils that have ruined the despotism it set out to overthrow.
The interest of this revolutionary epic lies largely in the marriage of Godwin's ideas with Mary Wollstonecraft's, which in the second generation bears its full imaginative fruit. The most eloquent verses are those which describe Cythna's leadership of the women in the national revolt, and enforce the theme "Can man be free, if woman be a slave?" Not less characteristic is the Godwinian abhorrence of violence, and the Godwinian trust in the magic of courageous passivity. Laon finds the revolutionary hosts about to slaughter their vanquished oppressors, and persuades them to mercy and fraternity with the appeal.
O wherefore should ill ever flow from ill
And pain still keener pain for ever breed.
He pardons and spares the tyrant himself; and Cythna shames the slaves who are sent to bind her, until they weep in a sudden perception of the beauty of virtue and courage. When the reaction breaks at length upon the victorious liberators, they stand passive to be hewn down, as Shelley, in the Masque of Anarchy, written after Peterloo, advised the English reformers to do.