No More Learning

. It is admitted that
the exercise of the imagination is the most delightful, but it is
alleged that that of reason is the more useful. . . . Whilst the mechanist
abridges and the political economist combines labour, let them be sure
that their speculations, for want of correspondence with those first
principles which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have
in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and
want. . . . The rich have become richer, the poor have become poorer, . . .
such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise
of the calculating faculty. ' The speaker of these things might almost
be Blake, who held that the Reason not only created Ugliness, but all
other evils. The books of all wisdom are hidden in the cave of the
Witch of Atlas, who is one of his personifications of beauty, and when
she moves over the enchanted river that is an image of all life, the
priests cast aside their deceits, and the king crowns an ape to mock
his own sovereignty, and the soldiers gather about the anvils to beat
their swords to ploughshares, and lovers cast away their timidity, and
friends are united; while the power which in _Laon and Cythna_ awakens
the mind of the reformer to contend, and itself contends, against the
tyrannies of the world, is first seen as the star of love or beauty.
And at the end of _The Ode to Naples_, he cries out to 'the spirit of
beauty' to overturn the tyrannies of the world, or to fill them with
its 'harmonizing ardours. ' He calls the spirit of beauty liberty,
because despotism, and perhaps, as 'the man of virtuous soul commands
not nor obeys,' all authority, pluck virtue from her path towards
beauty, and because it leads us by that love whose service is perfect
freedom. It leads all things by love, for he cries again and again
that love is the perception of beauty in thought and things, and it
orders all things by love, for it is love that impels the soul to its
expressions in thought and in action, by making us 'seek to awaken
in all things that are, a community with what we experience within
ourselves. ' 'We are born into the world, and there is something within
us which, from the instant that we live, more and more thirsts after
its likeness. ' We have 'a soul within our soul that describes a circle
around its proper paradise which pain and sorrow and evil dare not
overleap,' and we labour to see this soul in many mirrors, that we may
possess it the more abundantly. He would hardly seek the progress of
the world by any less gentle labour, and would hardly have us resist
evil itself. He bids the reformers in _The Philosophical Review of
Reform_ receive 'the onset of the cavalry,' if it be sent to disperse
their meetings, 'with folded arms,' and 'not because active resistance
is not justifiable, but because temperance and courage would produce
greater advantages than the most decisive victory;' and he gives them
like advice in _The Masque of Anarchy_, for liberty, the poem cries,
'is love,' and can make the rich man kiss its feet, and, like those who
followed Christ, give away his goods and follow it throughout the world.

He does not believe that the reformation of society can bring this
beauty, this divine order, among men without the regeneration of the
hearts of men. Even in _Queen Mab_, which was written before he had
found his deepest thought, or rather perhaps before he had found words
to utter it, for I do not think men change much in their deepest
thought, he is less anxious to change men's beliefs, as I think, than
to cry out against that serpent more subtle than any beast of the
field, 'the cause and the effect of tyranny. ' He affirms again and
again that the virtuous, those who have 'pure desire and universal
love,' are happy in the midst of tyranny, and he foresees a day when
'the spirit of nature,' the spirit of beauty of his later poems, who
has her 'throne of power unappealable in every human heart,' shall
have made men so virtuous that 'kingly glare will lose its power to
dazzle and silently pass by,' and as it seems commerce, 'the venal
interchange of all that human art or nature yields, which wealth should
purchase not,' come as silently to an end.

He was always, indeed in chief, a witness for that 'power
unappealable. ' Maddalo, in _Julian and Maddalo_, says that the soul is
powerless, and can only, like a 'dreary bell hung in a heaven-illumined
tower, toll our thoughts and our desires to meet round the rent heart
and pray;' but Julian, who is Shelley himself, replies, as the makers
of all religions have replied--

'Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek
But in our mind? And if we were not weak,
Should we be less in deed than in desire? '

while _Mont Blanc_ is an intricate analogy to affirm that the soul has
its sources in 'the secret strength of things,' 'which governs thought
and to the infinite heavens is a law. ' He even thought that men might
be immortal were they sinless, and his Cythna bids the sailors be
without remorse, for all that live are stained as they are. It is thus,
she says, that time marks men and their thoughts for the tomb.