A History of English Literature

evolt and became known as 'mad Shelley,' and his schoolfellows delighted
in driving him into paroxysms of rage. Already at Eton he read and accepted
the doctrines of the French pre-Revolutionary philosophers and their
English interpreter William Godwin. He came to believe not only that human
nature is essentially good, but that if left to itself it can be implicitly
trusted; that sin and misery are merely the results of the injustice
springing from the institutions of society, chief of which are organized
government, formal religion, law, and formal marriage; and that the one
essential thing is to bring about a condition where these institutions can
be abolished and where all men may be allowed to follow their own
inclinations. The great advance which has been made since Shelley's time in
the knowledge of history and the social sciences throws a pitiless light on
the absurdity of this theory, showing that social institutions, terribly
imperfect as they are, are by no means chiefly bad but rather represent the
slow gains of thousands of years of painful progress; none the less the
theory was bound to appeal irresistibly to such an impulsive and
inexperienced idealism as that of Shelley. It was really, of course, not so
much against social institutions themselves that Shelley revolted as
against their abuses, which were still more flagrantly apparent in his time
than in ours. When he repudiated Christianity and declared himself an
atheist, what he actually had in mind was the perverted parody of religion
mainly offered by the Church of his time; and, as some one has observed,
when he pronounced for love without marriage it was because of the
tragedies that he had seen in marriages without love. Much must be ascribed
also to his sheer radicalism--the instinct to fly violently against
whatever was conventionally accepted and violently to flaunt his adherence
to whatever was banned.
In 1810 Shelley entered Oxford, especially exasperated by parental
interference with his first boyish love, and already the author of some
crude prose-romances and poetry. In the university he devoted his time
chiefly to investigating subjects not included or permitted in the
curriculum, especially chemistry; and after a few months, having written a
pamphlet on 'The Necessity of Atheism' and sent it with conscientious zeal
to the heads of the colleges, he was expelled. Still a few months later,
being then nineteen years old, he allowed himself to be led, admittedly
only through pity, into a marriage with a certain Harriet Westbrook, a
frivolous and commonplace schoolgirl of sixteen. For the remaining ten
years of his short life he, like Byron, was a wanderer, sometimes in
straits for money, though always supported, after some time generously
enough, by his father. At first he tried the career of a professional
agitator; going to Ireland he attempted to arouse the people against
English tyranny by such devices as scattering copies of addresses from his
window in Dublin or launching them in bottles in the Bristol Channel; but
he was soon obliged to flee the country. It is hard, of course, to take
such conduct seriously; yet in the midst of much that was wild, his
pamphlets contained also much of solid wisdom, no small part of which has
since been enacted into law.
Unselfish as he was in the abstract, Shelley's enthusiast's egotism and the
unrestraint of his emotions rendered him fitful, capricious, unable to
appreciate any point of view but his own, and therefore when irritated or
excited capable of downright cruelty in concrete cases. The most painful
illustration is afforded by his treatment of his first wife. Three years
after his marriage he informed her that he considered the connection at an
end and abandoned her to what proved a few years of a wretched existence.
Shelley himself formed a union with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the
daughter of his revolutionary teacher. Her sympathetic though extravagant
admiration for his genius, now beginning to express itself in really great