Again, and yet again, he tells us that the heavenly city, the New Athens, "the kingless continents, sinless as Eden" shine in no common day, beside no earthly sea:
If Greece must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble,
And build themselves impregnably
In a diviner clime,
To Amphionic music on some cape sublime
Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.
Is it only an eloquent phrase, which satisfies us, by its beautiful words, we know not why, as the chords that make the "full close" in music content us? Or shall we re-interpret it in our own prose? Where any mind strives after justice, where any soul suffers and loves and defies, there is the ideal Republic.
We have moved from Dr. Price's sermon to Shelley's chorus. The eloquent old man, preaching in the first flush of hope that came with the new time, conceived that his eyes had seen the great salvation. The day of tyrants and priests was already over, and before the earth closed on his grave, a free Europe would be linked in a confederacy that had abolished war. A generation passed, and the winged victory is now a struggling hope, her pinions singed with the heat of battle, her song mingled with the rumour of massacre, speeding, a fugitive from fact, to the diviner climes of an ideal world. The logic of the revolution has worked to its predestined conclusion. It dreamed too eagerly of the end. It thought in indictments. It packed the present on its tumbrils, and cleared away the past with its dialectical guillotine. When the present was condemned and the past buried, the future had somehow eluded it. It executed the mother, and marvelled that the child should die.
The human mind can never be satisfied with the mere assurance that sooner or later the golden years will come. The mere lapse of time is in itself intolerable. If our waking life and our years of action are to regain a meaning, we must perceive that the process of evolution is itself significant and interesting. We are to-day so penetrated with that thought, that the notion of a state of perfection in the future seems to us as inconceivable and as little interesting as Rousseau's myth of a state of innocence in the past. We know very well that our ideal, whether we see it in the colours of Plato or Godwin or William Morris, does but measure the present development of our faculties. Long before the dream is realised in fact, a new horizon will have been unfolded before the imagination of mankind.
What is of value in this endless process is precisely the unfolding of ideals which record themselves, however imperfectly, in institutions, and still more the developing sense of comradeship and sympathy which links us in relations of justice and love with every creature that feels. We are old enough to pass lightly over the enthusiastic paradoxes that intoxicated the youth of the progressive idea. It is a truth that outworn institutions fetter and dwarf the mind of man. It is also a truth that institutions have moulded and formed that mind. To condemn the past is in the same breath to blast the future. The true basis for that piety towards our venerable inheritance which Burke preached, is that it has made for us the possibility of advance.
But our strivings would be languid, our march would be slow, were it not for the revolutionary leaven which Godwin's generation set fermenting. They taught how malleable and plastic is the human mind. They saw that by a resolute effort to change the environment of institutions and customs which educate us, we can change ourselves. They liberated us not so much from "priests and kings" as from the deadlier tyranny of the belief that human nature, with all its imperfections, is an innate character which it were vain to hope to reform. Their teaching is a tonic to the will, a reminder still eloquent, still bracing, that among the forces which make history the chief is the persuasion of the understanding, the conscious following of a rational ideal. From much that is iconoclastic and destructive in their ideal we may turn away unconvinced. There remain its ardent statement of the duty of humanity, which shames our practice after a century of progress, and its faith in the efficacy of unregimented opinion to supersede brute force. They taught a lesson which posterity has but half learned. We shall be the richer for returning to them, as much by what we reject as by what we embrace.