as it appears in his poems, very exhilarating. It is chiefly
expressed in negatives: there will be no priests, no kings, no marriage,
no war, no cruelty--man will be "tribeless and nationless." Though the
earth will teem with plenty beyond our wildest imagination, the general
effect is insipid; or, if there are colours in the scene, they are
hectic, unnatural colours. His couples of lovers, isolated in bowers of
bliss, reading Plato and eating vegetables, are poor substitutes for
the rich variety of human emotions which the real world, with all its
admixture of evil, actually admits. Hence Shelley's tone irritates when
he shrilly summons us to adore his New Jerusalem. Reflecting on the
narrowness of his ideals we are apt to see him as an ignorant and
fanatical sectary, and to detect an unpleasant flavour in his verse. And
we perceive that, as with all honest fanatics, his narrowness comes from
ignorance of himself. The story of Mrs. Southey's buns is typical. When
he visited Southey there were hot buttered buns for tea, and he so much
offended Mrs. Southey by calling them coarse, disgusting food that she
determined to make him try them. He ate first one, then another,
and ended by clearing off two plates of the unclean thing. Actively
conscious of nothing in himself but aspirations towards perfection,
he never saw that, like everyone else, he was a cockpit of ordinary
conflicting instincts; or, if this tumult of lower movements did emerge
into consciousness, he would judge it to be wholly evil, since it had
no connection, except as a hindrance, with his activities as a reformer.
Similarly the world at large, full as it was of nightmare oppressions
of wrong, fell for him into two sharply opposed spheres of light and
darkness on one side the radiant armies of right, on the other the
perverse opposition of devils.

With this hysterically over-simplified view of life, fostered by lack of
self-knowledge, was connected a corresponding mistake as to the means
by which his ends could be reached. One of the first observations which
generous spirits often make is that the unsatisfactory state of society
is due to some very small kink or flaw in the dispositions of the
majority of people. This perception, which it does not need much
experience to reach, is the source of the common error of youth that
everything can be put right by some simple remedy. If only some tiny
change could be made in men's attitude towards one another and