We shall have to look back a little and trace the intellectual history of Shelley before we can understand why he is a revolutionary. Rationalism of the eighteenth century was an important factor. The eighteenth century was an age of prose, social - mindedness and reason—the age of Voltaire, Newton, Adam Smith, Swift, Fielding, Lessing, and Samuel Johnson. It was an age when poetry was at a low ebb, and held closer to the earth, feeling and imagination being drained off. Rationalism and pseudo - classicism could not be good soil for poetry. The novelists, scientists, and social thinkers of the day developed a trend of humanitarianism. It meant largely an earthly reorientation of human attitude to life, and it could little suit the rapturous strain of lyric. Shelley's mind was nourished on such prosaic, empirical, and rational thought in the beginning of the eighteenth century. He had intellectual affiliations with Locke, Hume and Kant, and later Berkeley stimulated the idealistic strain in his mind.
Eighteenth century humanitarianism at first reflected itself in satire and invective (Voltaire, Swift, Fielding): later it tended towards radical propaganda, and so the existing order of things was attacked and the seed of revolution was sown, as in the writings of Helvetius, Holbach, Condorcet and Rousseau. In England their doctrines were promulgated by Godwin, Tom Paine, Volney, and Holcroft. Before Shelley was twenty - one, Shelley read and absorbed the writings of Helvetius, Holbach and Rousseau. In addition to these, he thoroughly studied William Godwin's Political Justice. The materialistic trend of these writings could not of course repress his imagination and idealism which were the essence of his being.
E. Neipokoeva, a Russian critic writes, “At the time he was at Eton and Oxford, Shelley showed a lively interest in philosophy and natural science. His vast correspondence in these years shows his wide acquaintance with the literature of English philosophy, French enlightenment, antiquity and Renaissance. At this time one of his important features clearly exhibited was his view of the world; it was a close blend between his philosophical and socio - political ideas. Overcoming the deistic representation of the world, Shelley as an atheist formulated the clearly understandable view that religion ‘is very closely bound up with politics’ and ever served the interests of the ruling classes.”
The intellectual tradition of which he was born, and which he so readily assimilated drew him to the striving for freedom of the individual and the freedom of classes, however his mind might have often drifted from the world of men and things to the realm of ideas. His rationality was beyond question, but it was often assisted by his overwhelming imagination, his unclouded vision of golden age to come, his speculative and idealistic trend. His idea of love as the solvent of all evil and oppression in the world might have also something to do with the diverting of his mind from practical politics.
His position is best summed up by J. R. Ullman; “..... in his affiliation as well as in his militant individualism, he was a true child of the revolution and of the earnest, rationalistic thinkers of an earlier generation who had given it its premises and its direction. He shared not only their emotional enthusiasm, but he was also in intellectual accord with their basic dogmas and beliefs; and even in the later, riper days of golden song, when as a spirit pure and free and disembodied he soared so far above the toiling world of transient things, he retained that credo of social reform and that unwavering belief in the perfectibility of man which had been born of the reasoning humanitarianism of the eighteenth century. No men and no schools can be said to have formed Shelley; what they did was to reinforce his beliefs and supply food for his insatiable mind. As a poet be must make his bow to God alone; but as a thinker and philosopher of the Revolution — in many respects the most sublime thinker which that world - madness produced—he is the lineal descendant of those prosaic, earthly reasoners of an earlier generation whose spirit and whose attitude toward life seem at first glance to be so dramatically opposed to his.”
Stopford Brooke traces his revolutionary passion from the early years of his life as the result of the reaction to the society in which he lived, and shows that this revolutionary passion dominates a large part of his poetry; “Unlike Wordsworth, he was a part of that class in English society which remained from the beginning untouched by the Revolution and which shared it. As he grew up he abhorred that society and all its ways, and directed all his energy against its opinions. He was a revolution in himself. He set the authorities at Eton at defiance; he was expelled from Oxford for atheism, and at once took his stand in a revolt against society. Then it was ...... that the still enduring ground - swell the French Revolution had caused in England broke upon him, and he was flooded by it.
That swelling tide, though it had died out in the middle ranks of society, was still heaving among the working classes, and among minor poets who sang their wrongs and sorrows. The misery they suffered increased in volume, and the ideas of which we have so often spoken rolled on in full power under the upper crust. Shelley went down to that level and drank there the cup of the Revolution. In 1812 he took up the cause of Ireland, and his “Address to the Irish people” might have been written at this present time by a gentle - minded Home Ruler. In 1813 Queen Mab came out. In it the ideas of the Revolution are reasserted, combined with the deliberate attack on the whole state of society in England, and deliberate attack on religion as one of the chief curses of society. But the chief revolutionary element in it is that which prophesies a happier society, a golden time to come, the perfection of mankind to be wrought out by suffering, by martyrdom for truth. Shelley was really in despair about the present and he was forced to look forward for all he hoped and all he wished to work for. This was the position of his whole life.”
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