th his
predisposition--the theory that all the good and beautiful things that
we love on earth are partial manifestations of an absolute beauty or
goodness, which exists eternal and unchanging, and from which everything
that becomes and perishes in time derives such reality as it has. Hence
our human life is good only in so far as we participate in the eternal
reality; and the communion is effected whenever we adore beauty, whether
in nature, or in passionate love, or in the inspiration of poetry. We
shall have to say something presently about the effects of this Platonic
idealism on Shelley's conception of love; here we need only notice that
it inspired him to translate Plato's 'Symposium', a dialogue occupied
almost entirely with theories about love. He was not, however, well
equipped for this task. His version, or rather adaptation (for much is
omitted and much is paraphrased), is fluent, but he had not enough Greek
to reproduce the finer shades of the original, or, indeed, to avoid
gross mistakes.

A poet who is also a Platonist is likely to exalt his office; it is
his not merely to amuse or to please, but to lead mankind nearer to the
eternal ideal--Shelley called it Intellectual Beauty--which is the
only abiding reality. This is the real theme of his 'Defence of Poetry'
(1821), the best piece of prose he ever wrote. Thomas Love Peacock,
scholar, novelist, and poet, and, in spite of his mellow worldliness,
one of Shelley's most admired friends, had published a wittily perverse
and paradoxical article, not without much good sense, on 'The Four Ages
of Poetry'. Peacock maintained that genuine poetry is only possible in
half-civilised times, such as the Homeric or Elizabethan ages, which,
after the interval of a learned period, like that of Pope in England,
are inevitably succeeded by a sham return to nature. What he had in mind
was, of course, the movement represented by Wordsworth, Southey, and
Coleridge, the romantic poets of the Lake School, whom he describes as
a "modern-antique compound of frippery and barbarism." He must have
greatly enjoyed writing such a paragraph as this: "A poet in our times
is a semi-barbarian in a civilised community. ... The march of his
intellect is like that of a crab, backward. The brighter the light
diffused around him by the progress of reason, the thicker is the
darkness of antiquated barbarism in which he buries himself like a mole,
to throw up the barren hillocks of his Cimmerian