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Whatever the effects may be on Shelleyan commentators, it must be said that, to the donnish eye, Percy Bysshe Shelley was nothing more or less than the ordinary Oxford poet, of the quieter type. In Walter Savage Landor, authority recognised a noisier and rowdier specimen of the same class. People who have to do with hundreds of young men at a time are unavoidably compelled to generalise.
When writing this, I was thinking of the obscure final speech about God in Heaven in Bjoernson's Mary Stuart, which I still regard as quite vague, pretentious though it be as it stands there; however, it was an exaggeration to generalise the grievance, as I had done, and Bjoernson was right to reply.
It is characteristic of the widening thought of the time that this not very heroical young man who, in any previous age, might well have been altogether occupied with the problem of his own individual necessities, should be able to stand there and generalise about the needs of the race. But upon all the stresses and conflicts of that chaotic time there was already dawning the light of a new era.
We think of 'the race' the twelve hundred millions that live to-day, and the uncounted crowds that have been, but the units in that inconceivable sum are not separate in our view. But He does not generalise so. He has a clear individualising knowledge of each; each separately has a place in His mind or heart.
An unlovely country, yes, as Englishmen understood beauty; and yet not without a charm of its own. An arduous life, certainly, and one full of pitfalls for the weak or the unwary; yet he believed it was no more impossible to win through here, and with clean hands, than anywhere else. To generalise as his companion had done was absurd.
And would not such a law generalise the phenomena of gravity, cohesion, atomic affinity, and electric repulsion, just as the laws of number generalise the quantitative phenomena of space, time, and force? The possibility of saying so much in support of an hypothesis the very reverse of M. Comte's, at once proves that his generalisation is only a half-truth.
It is, therefore, somewhat singular that their productions should so rarely have been examined on just and philosophical principles of criticism. The ancient writers themselves afford us but little assistance. When they particularise, they are commonly trivial: when they would generalise, they become indistinct. An exception must, indeed, be made in favour of Aristotle.
We enjoy the pleasures of knowledge as a race, dropping the Individual in our judgment; but we cannot generalise the pleasures of the understanding, because we cannot eliminate individuality from the judgments of others as we do from our own. Beauty alone can we enjoy both as individuals and as a race, that is, as representing a race.
Now if we try to generalise the lessons that lie in these three great divisions of the section, we get, I think, first, anxious thought is contrary to all the lessons of nature, which show it to be unnecessary. That is the first, the longest section. Then, secondly, anxious thought is contrary to all the lessons of revelation or religion, which show it to be heathenish.
We may go further, and observe that the conditions under which Greek art flourished developed what the Germans call "Allgemeinheit," a tendency to generalise, which was inimical to strongly marked facial expression or characterisation.
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