That in spite of this impetuous attack upon the stereotyped presentations of Theism, Shelley had an eminently religious temperament has been well insisted upon by a recent biographer:—
“Brimming over with love for men, he was deficient in sympathy with the conditions under which they actually think and feel. Could he but dethrone the anarch, Custom, the ‘Millennium,’ he argued, would immediately arrive; nor did he stop to think how different was the fibre of his own soul from that of the unnumbered multitudes around him. In his adoration of what he recognised as living, he retained no reverence for the ossified experience of past ages.... For he had a vital faith, and this faith made the ideals he conceived seem possible—faith in the duty and desirability of overthrowing idols; faith in the gospel of liberty, fraternity, equality; faith in the divine beauty of Nature; faith in the perfectibility of man; faith in the omnipresent soul, whereof our souls are atoms; faith in love, as the ruling and co-ordinating substance of morality. The man who lived by this faith was in no vulgar sense of the word ‘atheist.’ When he proclaimed himself to be one he pronounced his hatred of a gloomy religion which had been the instrument of kings and priests for the enslavement of their fellow beings. As he told his friend Trelawney, he used the word Atheism ‘to express his abhorrence of superstition: he took it up, as a knight took up a gauntlet, in defiance of injustice.’”[234]
So thorough was his contempt for mere received and routine thought, that even Aristotle, the great idol of the mediæval schoolmen, and still an object of extraordinary veneration in the elder University, became for him a kind of synonym for despotic authority—
“Tomes
Of reasoned Wrong glozed on by Ignorance”—
and was, accordingly, treated with undue neglect. As for politics, as represented in the parliament and public Press of his day, he was indignantly impatient of the too usual trifling and unreality of public life. He seldom read the newspapers; nor could he ever bring himself to mix with the “rabble of the House.”
Thus, forced into antipathy to the ordinary and orthodox business of life around him, the poet withdrew himself more and more from it into his own thoughts, and hopes, and aspirations, which he communicated to his familiar friends. Some of those, however, into whose society he chanced to be thrown, were not of a sort of mind most congenial to his own. Yet they all bear witness to his surpassing moral no less than mental, constitution. “In no individual, perhaps, was the moral sense ever more completely developed than in Shelley,” says one of his most intimate acquaintances; “in no being was the perception of right and wrong more acute.”
“As his love of intellectual pursuits was vehement, and the vigour of his genius almost celestial, so were the purity and sanctity of his life most conspicuous.... I have had the happiness to associate with some of the best specimens of gentleness; but (may my candour and preference be pardoned), I can affirm that Shelley was almost the only example I have yet found that was never wanting, even in the most minute particular, of the infinite and various observances of pure, entire, and perfect gentility.” This is the voluntary testimony of a friend who was not inclined to excess of praise.[235]
The sudden end of his career at Oxford had estranged him from his father, who was of a temperament the very opposite to that of the enthusiastic reformer—harsh, intolerant, and bigoted in his prejudices; and the young Shelley’s marriage, shortly afterwards, to Harriet Westbrook, a young girl of much beauty, but of little cultivation of mind, and in a position of life different from his own, incensed him still further. The marriage, happy enough in the beginning, proved to be an ill-assorted one, and various causes contributed to the inevitable dénouement. After a union of some three years, the marriage, by mutual consent, was dissolved. Two years later—not, it seems, in consequence of the divorce, as sometimes has been suggested—the young wife put an end to her existence—a terrible and tragic termination of an ill-considered attachment, which must have caused him the deepest pangs of grief, and which seems always, and justly, to have cast a gloomy shadow upon his future life.
Brief as his career was, we can refer only to the most interesting events in it. Of these, his enthusiastic effort to arouse a bloodless revolution in Ireland, such as, if effected, might have prevented the continued miseries of that especially neglected portion of the three kingdoms, is not the least noteworthy. With his lately-married wife and her sister he was living at Keswick, when, by a sudden inspiration, he resolved to cross the Channel, and engage in the work of propagating his principles of political and social reform. This was in the early part of 1812. In Dublin, where they established their head-quarters, he printed an Address to the Irish People, which, by his own hands, as well as by other agency, was distributed far and wide. In this wonderfully well-considered and reasonable manifesto, the principles laid down as necessary to success in attempting deliverance from ages of bad laws and misgovernment, are as sound as the ardour and sincerity of his hopeless undertaking are unmistakeable. The cosmopolitan scope of the Address appears in such passages as these:—