“Do not inquire if a man be a heretic, if he be a Quaker, a Jew, or a Heathen, but if he be a virtuous man, if he love liberty and truth, if he wish the happiness and peace of human kind. If a man be ever so much ‘a believer,’ and love not these things, he is a heartless hypocrite and a knave.... It is not a merit to tolerate, but it is a crime to be intolerant.... Be calm, mild, deliberate, patient.... Think, and talk, and discuss.... Be free and be happy, but first be wise and good.... Habits of sobriety, regularity, and thought must be entered into and firmly resolved upon.”
Truer in his perception of the radical causes and cure of national evils than most party politicians, he urged the essential need of ethical and social change, without which mere political change of parties, or increase in material wealth of some sections in the community, must be valueless in any true estimate of a nation’s prosperity. Shelley also issued, in pamphlet form, Proposals for an Association—a plan for the formation of a vast society of Irish Catholics, to enforce their “emancipation”—a measure which was not brought about until twenty years later after long and vehement opposition.
Two months were devoted to this generous but futile work; the people of Ireland did not move, and the young reformer returned to England, but without abandoning his propaganda of the principles of liberty and justice. While residing in Somersetshire he published a paper entitled a Declaration of Rights, to circulate which recourse was had to ingenious methods. Four years later, in 1817, he published A Proposal for putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom. “He saw that the House of Commons did not represent the country; and acting upon his principle that Government is the servant of the Governed, he sought means for ascertaining the real will of the nation with regard to its Parliament, and for bringing the collective opinions of the population to bear upon its rulers. The plan proposed was that a large network of committees should be formed, and that by their means every individual man should be canvassed. We find here the same method of advancing reform by peaceable associations as in Ireland.” At the same time, in presence of the incalculable amount of ignorance, destitution, and consequent venality of the great mass of the community—the necessary outcome of long ages of bad and selfish legislation—Universal Suffrage for the present appeared to him to be not a safe experiment. Evidence of controversial power, is his “grave and lofty” Letter to Lord Ellenborough, who had recently sentenced to imprisonment the printers of the Age of Reason, “an eloquent argument in favour of toleration and the freedom of the intellect, carrying the matter beyond the instance of legal tyranny, which occasioned its composition, and treating it with philosophical if impassioned, seriousness.”[236] Before his visit to Ireland, he had been engaged (as he tells his correspondent, William Godwin) in writing An Inquiry into the Causes of the Failure of the French Revolution to Benefit Mankind. We have to lament that this Essay seems never to have been completed, since it is hardly doubtful that it would have been of unusual interest. Such was the force and activity of Shelley’s intellect, as displayed in the regions of practical philosophy, at the age of twenty, and before he had given to the world his first productions in poetry.
Queen Mab, written in part two years before, was finished and printed in 1813. Although it may have some of the defects of immaturity of genius, it has the charm of a genuine poetic inspiration. Intense hatred of selfish injustice and untruth in all their shapes, equally intense sympathy with all suffering, sublime faith in the ultimate triumph of Good, clothed in the language of entrancing eloquence and sublimity, are the characteristics of this unique poem. The author’s depreciation of his earliest poetic attempt in after years, in a letter addressed to the Examiner, only a month before his death, strikes us as scarcely sincere, and as having been a sort of necessary sacrifice on the altar of Expediency.
In this exquisitely beautiful prophecy of a “Golden Age” to be, the fairy Queen Mab, the unembodied being who acts as his instructress and guide through the Universe, displays to his affrighted vision, in one vast panorama, the horrors of the Past and the Present. She afterwards, in a glorious apocalypse, relieves his despair by revealing to him the “new heavens and the new earth,” which eventually will displace the present evil constitution of things on our planet. On the redeemed and regenerated Globe:—
“Ambiguous Man! he that can know
More misery, and can dream more joy than all:
Whose keen sensations thrill within his heart,
To mingle with a loftier instinct there,
Lending their power to pleasure and to pain,