opening in which
man, casting aside old shackles and prejudices, could advance at once
towards knowledge, joy, splendour, both for himself and all his fellows.
Shelley, perhaps, is most typical of what I mean. Hogg laughed at him
for his belief in the 'perfectibility' of the race, but Hogg knew the
belief was vital to the poet. To Shelley it was a damnable doctrine that
the many should ever be sacrificed to the few: yet neither was the
ultimate vision that inspired him the vision of the few being sacrificed
for the many. He was anything but an ascetic seeking martyrdom. The
martyrdom of his Prometheus is a prelude to the Unbinding when
happiness shall flood the world:--

'The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness!
The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
The vaporous exultation not to be confined!'

And not only happiness and love, but knowledge also: the Earth calls to
the Sky: 'Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.'
Soberer spirits shared this poet's ecstasy. Wordsworth sang

'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.'

And that heaven was exactly this foretaste of the Spirit of Man entering
undisturbed into his full inheritance at last: Science welcomed as a
dear and honoured guest, Poetry known as 'the breath and finer spirit
that is in the countenance of all knowledge'.

It is scarcely necessary even to mention the high hopes of the French
themselves, the confident anticipation of an Age of Reason when all men
should be brothers and the earth bring forth all her treasures, but it
is well worth noting the attitude of Goethe, an attitude the more
significant because, in a sense, Goethe always stood outside the French
Revolution. But he, like the best of its votaries--and this is less
known than it should be--desired the development of all men every whit
as much as he desired the high culture of a few. It was for the double
goal that he worked. 'Only through all men,' he writes in a notable
passage, 'only through all men, can mankind be made.'[72] All good lies
in Man, he tells us again, and must be developed, 'only not in one man,
but in many'. Goethe, the so-called aristocrat, has given us here as
true a formula for the democratic faith as could well be found. And to
him, as to Shelley and to Wordsworth, Poetry and Science were not
enemies but friends dearer than sisters. Those three, Shelley,
Wordsworth, and Goethe, foreshadow