d that the publication of that biography did a signal
disservice to the memory of the poet whom Professor Dowden idolized. The
lack of taste, judgment, and humour which pervades the book, and its
complete, though of course unintended, condonation of heinous evil,
deserved a severe castigation, and Arnold bestowed it with a vigour and
a thoroughness which show how deeply his moral sense had been shocked.
"What a set! what a world! is the exclamation that breaks from us as we
come to an end of this history of 'the occurrences of Shelley's private
life.' ... Godwin's house of sordid horror, and Godwin preaching and
holding the hat, and the green-spectacled Mrs. Godwin, and Hogg the
faithful friend, and Hunt the Horace of this precious world!"

Fresh from pursuing, step by step, Professor Dowden's grim narrative of
seduction and suicide, with its ludicrous testimony to Shelley's
"conscientiousness," Arnold says, with honest indignation, "After
reading his book, one feels sickened for ever of the subject of
irregular relations.... I conclude that an entirely human
inflammability, joined to an inhuman want of humour and a super-human
power of self-deception, are the causes which chiefly explain Shelley's
abandonment of Harriet in the first place, and then his behaviour to her
and defence of himself afterwards."

In spite of all this abomination, which he so clearly saw and so
strongly reprehended, he still stands firm in his admiration of the
"ideal Shelley," "the delightful Shelley," "the friend of the
unfriended poor," the radiant and many-coloured poet, with his mastery
of the medium of sounds, and the "natural magic in his rhythm." But then
he adds this salutary caution: "Let no one suppose that a want of humour
and a self-delusion such as Shelley's have no effect upon a man's
poetry. The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and
Shelley's poetry is not entirely sane either." In poetry, as in life, he
is "a beautiful and ineffectual angel."

And just as, in Arnold's view, moral defects in an author were apt to
mar the perfection of his work, so an author's moral virtues might
ennoble and enlarge his authorship. Hear him on his friend Arthur
Clough: "He possessed, in an eminent degree, these two invaluable
literary qualities: a true sense for his object of study, and a
single-hearted care for it. He had both; but he had the second even more
eminently than the first. He greatly developed the first through mean