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Shelley by Sydney Philip Perigal Waterlow
page 3 of 79 (03%)
divinity, still carrying, even when mutilated and obscured by
frailties, some suggestion of St. Francis or of Christ.

The object of these pages is not to idealise either his life,
his characte, or his works. The three are inseparably
connected, and to understand one we must understand all. The
reason is that Shelley is one of the most subjective of
writers. It would be hard to name a poet who has kept his art
more free from all taint of representation of the real, making
it nor an instrument for creating something life-like, but a
more and more intimate echo or emanation of his own spirit. In
studying his writings we shall see how they flow from his
dominating emotion of love for his fellow-men; and the drama of
his life, displayed against the background of the time, will in
turn throw light on that emotion. His benevolence took many
forms--none perfect, some admirable, some ridiculous. It was
too universal. He never had a clear enough perception of the
real qualities of real men and women; hence his loves for
individuals, as capricious as they were violent, always seem to
lack something which is perhaps the most valuable element in
human affection. If in this way we can analyse his temperament
successfully, the process should help us to a more critical
understanding, and so to a fuller enjoyment, of the poems.

This greatest of our lyric poets, the culmination of the
Romantic Movement in English literature, appeared in an age
which, following on the series of successful wars that had
established British power all over the world, was one of the
gloomiest in our history. If in some ways the England of
1800-20 was ahead of the rest of Europe, in others it lagged
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