aves his
whole mind free to develop things aesthetic after their own kind; his
abstraction permits purity, his playfulness makes room for creative
freedom, his ethereal quality is only humanity having its way.

We perhaps do ourselves an injustice when we think that the heart of
us is sordid; what is sordid is rather the situation that cramps or
stifles the heart. In itself our generative principle is surely no
less fertile and generous than the generative principle of crystals or
flowers. As it can produce a more complex body, it is capable of
producing a more complex mind; and the beauty and life of this mind,
like that of the body, is all predetermined in the seed. Circumstances
may suffer the organism to develop, or prevent it from doing so; they
cannot change its plan without making it ugly and deformed. What
Shelley's mind draws from the outside, its fund of images, is like
what the germ of the body draws from the outside, its food--a mass of
mere materials to transform and reorganise. With these images Shelley
constructs a world determined by his native genius, as the seed
organises out of its food a predetermined system of nerves and
muscles. Shelley's poetry shows us the perfect but naked body of human
happiness. What clothes circumstances may compel most of us to add may
be a necessary concession to climate, to custom, or to shame; they
can hardly add a new vitality or any beauty comparable to that which
they hide.

When the soul, as in Shelley's case, is all goodness, and when the
world seems all illegitimacy and obstruction, we need not wonder that
_freedom_ should be regarded as a panacea. Even if freedom had not
been the idol of Shelley's times, he would have made an idol of it for
himself. "I never could discern in him," says his friend Hogg, "any
more than two principles. The first was a strong, irrepressible love
of liberty.... The second was an equally ardent love of toleration ...
and ... an intense abhorrence of persecution." We all fancy nowadays
that we believe in liberty and abhor persecution; but the liberty we
approve of is usually only a variation in social compulsions, to make
them less galling to our latest sentiments than the old compulsions
would be if we retained them. Liberty of the press and liberty to vote
do not greatly help us in living after our own mind, which is, I
suppose, the only positive sort of liberty. From the point of view of
a poet, there can be little essential freedom