n
the story of Marius and the Executioner (see p. 128).

And one more daring, raised his steel anew
To pierce the stranger: "What hast thou to do
With me, poor wretch?"--calm, solemn and severe
That voice unstrung his sinews, and he threw
His dagger on the ground, and pale with fear,
Sate silently.

The pages of Shelley are littered with such reminiscences.

Matthew Arnold said of Shelley that he was "a beautiful and ineffectual
angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." One is tempted to
retort that to be beautiful is in itself to escape futility, and to
people a void with angels is to be far from ineffectual. But the
metaphor is more striking as phrase-making than as criticism. The world
into which the angel fell, wide-eyed, indignant, and surprised, was not
a void. It was a nightmare composed of all the things which to common
mortals are usual, normal, inevitable--oppressions and wars, follies and
crimes, kings and priests, hangmen and inquisitors, poverty and luxury.
If he beat his wings in this cage of horrors, it was with the rage and
terror of a bird which belongs to the free air. Shelley, Matthew Arnold
held, was not quite sane. Sanity is a capacity for becoming accustomed
to the monstrous. Not time nor grey hairs could bring that kind of
sanity to Shelley's clear-sighted madness. If he must be compared to an
angel, Mr. Wells has drawn him for us. He was the angel whom a country
clergyman shot in mistake for a buzzard, in that graceful satire, _The
Wonderful Visit_. Brought to earth by this mischance, he saw our follies
and our crimes without the dulling influence of custom. Satirists have
loved to imagine such a being. Voltaire drew him with as much wit as
insight in _L'Ingenu_--the American savage who landed in France, and
made the amazing discovery of civilisation. Shelley had not dropped from
the clouds nor voyaged from the backwoods, but he seems always to be
discovering civilisation with a fresh wonder and an insatiable
indignation.

One may doubt whether a saint has ever lived more selfless, more devoted
to the beauty of virtue; but one quality Shelley lacked which is
commonly counted a virtue. He had none of that imaginative sympathy
which can make its own the motives and desires of other men.
Self-interest, intolerance and greed he understood as little as common
men understand heroism and devotion. He had no mean powers of
observation. He saw the world as it was, and p