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the most durable outcome of ours may be execution by electricity;

so in our own society the talk of benevolence and the cult of

childhood are the very fashion of the hour。  We; of this self…

conscious; incredulous generation; sentimentalise our children;

analyse our children; think we are endowed with a special capacity

to sympathise and identify ourselves with children; we play at being

children。  And the result is that we are not more child…like; but

our children are less child…like。  It is so tiring to stoop to the

child; so much easier to lift the child up to you。  Know you what it

is to be a child?  It is to be something very different from the man

of to…day。  It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of

baptism; it is to believe in love; to believe in loveliness; to

believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to

whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches; and mice

into horses; lowness into loftiness; and nothing into everything;

for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to

live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space;

it is





To see a world in a grain of sand;

And a heaven in a wild flower;

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand;

And eternity in an hour;





it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life; nor

petition that it be commuted into death。  When we become conscious

in dreaming that we dream; the dream is on the point of breaking;

when we become conscious in living that we live; the ill dream is

but just beginning。  Now if Shelley was but too conscious of the

dream; in other respects Dryden's false and famous line might have

been applied to him with very much less than it's usual untruth。 {5}

To the last; in a degree uncommon even among poets; he retained the

idiosyncrasy of childhood; expanded and matured without

differentiation。  To the last he was the enchanted child。



This was; as is well known; patent in his life。  It is as really;

though perhaps less obviously; manifest in his poetry; the sincere

effluence of his life。  And it may not; therefore; be amiss to

consider whether it was conditioned by anything beyond his

congenital nature。  For our part; we believe it to have been equally

largely the outcome of his early and long isolation。  Men given to

retirement and abstract study are notoriously liable to contract a

certain degree of childlikeness:  and if this be the case when we

segregate a man; how much more when we segregate a child!  It is

when they are taken into the solution of school…life that children;

by the reciprocal interchange of influence with their fellows;

undergo the series of reactions which converts them from children

into boys and from boys into men。  The intermediate stage must be

traversed to reach the final one。



Now Shelley never could have been a man; for he never was a boy。

And the reason lay in the persecution which overclouded his school…

days。  Of that persecution's effect upon him; he has left us; in The

Revolt of Islam; a picture which to many or most people very

probably seems a poetical exaggeration; partly because Shelley

appears to have escaped physical brutality; partly because adults

are inclined to smile tenderly at childish sorrows which are not

caused by physical suffering。  That he escaped for the most part

bodily violence is nothing to the purpose。  It is the petty

malignant annoyance recurring hour by hour; day by day; month by

month; until its accumulation becomes an agony; it is this which is

the most terrible weapon that boys have against their fellow boy;

who is powerless to shun it because; unlike the man; he has

virtually no privacy。  His is the torture which the ancients used;

when they anointed their victim with honey and exposed him naked to

the restless fever of the flies。  He is a little St。 Sebastian;

sinking under the incessant flight of shafts which skilfully avoid

the vital parts。



We do not; therefore; suspect Shelley of exaggeration:  he was; no

doubt; in terrible misery。  Those who think otherwise must forget

their own past。  Most people; we suppose; MUST forget what they were

like when they were children:  otherwise they would know that the

griefs of their childhood were passionate abandonment; DECHIRANTS

(to use a characteristically favourite phrase of modern French

literature) as the griefs of their maturity。  Children's griefs are

little; certainly; but so is the child; so is its endurance; so is

its field of vision; while its nervous impressionability is keener

than ours。  Grief is a matter of relativity; the sorrow should be

estimated by its proportion to the sorrower; a gash is as painful to

one as an amputation to another。  Pour a puddle into a thimble; or

an Atlantic into Etna; both thimble and mountain overflow。  Adult

fools; would not the angels smile at our griefs; were not angels too

wise to smile at them?



So beset; the child fled into the tower of his own soul; and raised

the drawbridge。  He threw out a reserve; encysted in which he grew

to maturity unaffected by the intercourses that modify the maturity

of others into the thing we call a man。  The encysted child

developed until it reached years of virility; until those later

Oxford days in which Hogg encountered it; then; bursting at once

from its cyst and the university; it swam into a world not

illegitimately perplexed by such a whim of the gods。  It was; of

course; only the completeness and duration of this seclusion

lasting from the gate of boyhood to the threshold of youthwhich

was peculiar to Shelley。  Most poets; probably; like most saints;

are prepared for their mission by an initial segregation; as the

seed is buried to germinate:  before they can utter the oracle of

poetry; they must first be divided from the body of men。  It is the

severed head that makes the seraph。



Shelley's life frequently exhibits in him the magnified child。  It

is seen in his fondness for apparently futile amusements; such as

the sailing of paper boats。  This was; in the truest sense of the

word; child…like; not; as it is frequently called and considered;

childish。  That is to say; it was not a mindless triviality; but the

genuine child's power of investing little things with imaginative

interest; the same power; though differently devoted; which produced

much of his poetry。  Very possibly in the paper boat he saw the

magic bark of Laon and Cythna; or





That thinnest boat

In which the mother of the months is borne

By ebbing night into her western cave。





In fact; if you mark how favourite an idea; under varying forms; is

this in his verse; you will perceive that all the charmed boats

which glide down the stream of his poetry are but glorified

resurrections of the little paper argosies which trembled down the

Isis。



And the child appeared no less often in Shelley the philosopher than

in Shelley the idler。  It is seen in his repellent no less than in

his amiable weaknesses; in the unteachable folly of a love that made

its goal its starting…point; and firmly expected spiritual rest from

each new divinity; though it had found none from the divinities

antecedent。  For we are clear that this was no mere straying of

sensual appetite; but a straying; strange and deplorable; of the

spirit; that (contrary to what Mr。 Coventry Patmore has said) he

left a woman not because he was tired of her arms; but because he

was tired of her soul。  When he found Mary Shelley wanting; he seems

to have fallen into the mistake of Wordsworth; who complained in a

charming piece of unreasonableness that his wife's love; which had

been a fountain; was now only a well:





Such change; and at the very door

Of my fond heart; hath made me poor。





Wordsworth probably learned; what Shelley was incapable of learning;

that love can never permanently be a fountain。  A living poet; in an

article {6} which you almost fear to breathe upon lest you should

flutter some of the frail pastel…like bloom; has said the thing:

〃Love itself has tidal moments; lapses and flows due to the metrical

rule of the interior heart。〃  Elementary reason should proclaim this

true。  Love is an affection; its display an emotion:  love is the

air; its display is the wind。  An affection may be constant; an

emotion can no more be constant than the wind can constantly blow。

All; therefore; that a man can reasonably ask of his wife is that

her love should be indeed a well。  A well; but a Bethesda…well; into

which from time to time the angel of tenderness descends to trouble

the waters for the healing of the beloved。  Such a love Shelley's

second wife appears unquestionably to have given him。  Nay; she was

content that he should veer while she remained true; she companioned

him intellectually; shared his views; entered into his aspirations;

and yetyet; even at the date of Epipsychidion the foolish child;

h

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