creed of conservatism and resignation. Shelley felt the world as
struggle and revolt, and like all the poets, he used Heaven as the vast
canvas on which to paint with a demonic brush an heroic idealisation of
what he saw below. It would be interesting to know whether any human
heart, however stout and rebellious, when once it saw the cosmic process
as struggle, has ever been able to think of the issue as uncertain.
Certainly for Shelley there was never a doubt about the final triumph of
good. Godwin qualified his agnosticism by supposing that there was a
tendency in things (he would not call it spiritual, or endow it with
mind) which somehow cooperates with us and assures the victory of life
(see p. 184). One seems to meet this vague principle, this reverend
Thing, in Shelley's Demogorgon, the shapeless, awful negation which
overthrows the maleficent Jupiter, and with his fall inaugurates the
golden age. The strange name of Demogorgon has probably its origin in
the clerical error of some mediaeval copyist, fumbling with the scholia
of an anonymous grammarian. One can conceive that it appealed to
Shelley's wayward fancy because it suggested none of the traditional
theologies; and certainly it has a mysterious and venerable sound.
Shelley can describe It only as Godwin describes his principle by a
series of negatives.

I see a mighty darkness
Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom
Dart round, as light from the meridian sun,
Ungazed upon and shapeless; neither limb,
Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is
A living spirit.

It is the eternal =X= which the human spirit always assumes when it is at
a loss to balance its equations. Demogorgon is, because if It were not,
our strivings would be a battle in the mist, with no clear trumpet-note
that promised triumph. Shelley, turning amid his singing to the
supremest of all creative work, the making of a mythology, invents his
God very much as those detested impostors, the primitive priests, had
done. He gives Humanity a friendly Power as they had endowed their tribe
with a god of battles. Humanity at grips with chaos is curiously like a
nigger clan in the bush. It needs a fetish of victory. But a poet's
mythology is to be judged by its fruits. A faith is worth the cathedral
it builds. A myth is worth the poem it inspires.

If Shelley's ultimate view of reality is vague, a thing to be shadowed
in myths and hinted in symbols, there is nothing indefin