reat reputation. They may dazzle for a
moment, but they cannot absolve an artist from the need of having an
important subject-matter and a sane humanity.

If this principle is accepted, however, it might seem that certain
artists, and perhaps the greatest, might not fare well at our hands.
How would Shelley, for instance, stand such a test? Every one knows
the judgment passed on Shelley by Matthew Arnold, a critic who
evidently relied on this principle, even if he preferred to speak only
in the name of his personal tact and literary experience. Shelley,
Matthew Arnold said, was "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating
his wings in a luminous void in vain." In consequence he declared that
Shelley was not a classic, especially as his private circle had had an
unsavoury morality, to be expressed only by the French word _sale_,
and as moreover Shelley himself occasionally showed a distressing want
of the sense of humour, which could only be called _bete_. These
strictures, if a bit incoherent, are separately remarkably just. They
unmask essential weaknesses not only in Shelley, but in all
revolutionary people. The life of reason is a heritage and exists only
through tradition. Half of it is an art, an adjustment to an alien
reality, which only a long experience can teach: and even the other
half, the inward inspiration and ideal of reason, must be also a
common inheritance in the race, if people are to work together or so
much as to understand one another. Now the misfortune of
revolutionists is that they are disinherited, and their folly is that
they wish to be disinherited even more than they are. Hence, in the
midst of their passionate and even heroic idealisms, there is commonly
a strange poverty in their minds, many an ugly turn in their lives,
and an ostentatious vileness in their manners. They wish to be the
leaders of mankind, but they are wretched representatives of humanity.
In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if
one is out of tune with everything. We should not then be yielding to
any private bias, but simply noting the conditions under which art may
exist and may be appreciated, if we accepted the classical principle
of criticism and asserted that substance, sanity, and even a sort of
pervasive wisdom are requisite for supreme works of art. On the other
hand--who can honestly doubt it?--the rebels and individualists are
the men of direct insight and vital hope. The poetry of Shell