No More Learning

Since then I have observed dreams and
visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has
some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its
commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent,
are the most binding we can ever know. I have re-read _Prometheus
Unbound_, which I had hoped my fellow-students would have studied as a
sacred book, and it seems to me to have an even more certain place than
I had thought, among the sacred books of the world. I remember going
to a learned scholar to ask about its deep meanings, which I felt more
than understood, and his telling me that it was Godwin's _Political
Justice_ put into rhyme, and that Shelley was a crude revolutionist,
and believed that the overturning of kings and priests would regenerate
mankind. I quoted the lines which tell how the halcyons ceased to
prey on fish, and how poisonous leaves became good for food, to show
that he foresaw more than any political regeneration, but was too
timid to push the argument. I still believe that one cannot help
believing him, as this scholar I know believes him, a vague thinker,
who mixed occasional great poetry with a phantastic rhetoric, unless
one compares such passages, and above all such passages as describe
the liberty he praised, till one has discovered the system of belief
that lay behind them. It should seem natural to find his thought full
of subtlety, for Mrs. Shelley has told how he hesitated whether he
should be a metaphysician or a poet, and has spoken of his 'huntings
after the obscure' with regret, and said of that _Prometheus Unbound_,
which so many for three generations have thought _Political Justice_
put into rhyme, 'It requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as his
own to understand the mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem.
They elude the ordinary reader by their abstraction and delicacy of
distinction, but they are far from vague. It was his design to write
prose metaphysical essays on the Nature of Man, which would have served
to explain much of what is obscure in his poetry; a few scattered
fragments of observation and remarks alone remain. He considered
these philosophical views of mind and nature to be instinct with
the intensest spirit of poetry. ' From these scattered fragments and
observations, and from many passages read in their light, one soon
comes to understand that his liberty was so much more than the liberty
of _Political Justice_ that it was one with Intellectual Beauty, and
that the regeneration he foresaw was so much more than the regeneration
many political dreamers have foreseen, that it could not come in its
perfection till the hours bore 'Time to his grave in eternity. ' In _A
Defence of Poetry_, the profoundest essay on the foundation of poetry
in English, he shows that the poet and the lawgiver hold their station
by the right of the same faculty, the one uttering in words and the
other in the forms of society, his vision of the divine order, the
Intellectual Beauty. 'Poets, according to the circumstances of the age
and nation in which they appeared, were called in the earliest epoch
of the world legislators or prophets, and a poet essentially comprises
and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely
the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which
present things are to be ordained, but he beholds the future in the
present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flowers and the fruit of
latest time. ' 'Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits
of action are all the instruments and materials of poetry.
' Poetry
is 'the creation of actions according to the unchangeable process of
human nature as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself
the image of all other minds. ' 'Poets have been challenged to resign
the civic crown to reasoners and merchants. . . . 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, . . .