internal sentiment.
Byron's cry is: There is a law, and therefore I am miserable. Why
cannot I keep the law? Shelley's is: There is a law, and therefore
I am miserable. Why should not the law be abolished?--Away with it,
for it interferes with my sentiments--Away with marriage, "custom and
faith, the foulest birth of time."--We do not wish to follow him down
into the fearful sins which he defended with the small powers of
reasoning--and they were peculiarly small--which he possessed. Let
any one who wishes to satisfy himself of the real difference between
Byron's mind and Shelley's, compare the writings in which each of
them treats the same subject--namely, that frightful question about
the relation of the sexes, which forms, evidently, Manfred's crime;
and see if the result is not simply this, that Shelley glorifies what
Byron damns. "Lawless love" is Shelley's expressed ideal of the
relation of the sexes; and his justice, his benevolence, his pity,
are all equally lawless. "Follow your instincts," is his one moral
rule, confounding the very lowest animal instincts with those lofty
ideas of might, which it was the will of Heaven that he should
retain, ay, and love, to the very last, and so reducing them all to
the level of sentiments. "Follow your instincts"--But what if our
instincts lead us to eat animal food? "Then you must follow the
instincts of me, Percy Bysshe Shelley. I think it horrible, cruel;
it offends my taste." What if our instincts lead us to tyrannise
over our fellow-men? "Then you must repress those instincts. I,
Shelley, think that, too, horrible and cruel." Whether it be
vegetarianism or liberty, the rule is practically the same--sentiment
which, in his case, as in the case of all sentimentalists, turns out
to mean at last, not the sentiments of mankind in general, but the
private sentiments of the writer. This is Shelley; a sentimentalist
pure and simple; incapable of anything like inductive reasoning;
unable to take cognisance of any facts but those which please his
taste, or to draw any conclusion from them but such as also pleases
his taste; as, for example, in that eighth stanza of the "Ode to
Liberty," which, had it been written by any other man but Shelley,
possessing the same knowledge as he, one would have called a wicked
and deliberate lie--but in his case, is to be simply passed over with
a sigh, like a young lady's proofs of table-turning and rapping
spirits. She wished