The Godwinism, indeed, is strongest in the crude poetry of 'Queen Mab,' where many passages read like the 'Political Justice' done into verse. So, for example, we have a naïf statement of the incoherent theory which has already been noticed in Godwin's treatise. After pointing to some of the miseries which afflict unfortunate mankind, and observing that they are not due to man's 'evil nature,' which, it seems, is merely a figment invented to excuse crimes, the question naturally suggests itself, to what, then, can all this mischief be due? Nature has made everything perfect and harmonious, except man. On man alone she has, it seems, heaped 'ruin, vice, and slavery.' But the indignant answer is given:—
Nature! No! Kings, priests, and statesmen blast the human flower Even in its tender bud; their influence darts Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins Of desolate society.
According to this ingenious view, 'kings, priests, and statesmen' are something outside of, and logically opposed to, Nature. They represent the evil principle in this strange dualism. Whence this influence arises, how George III. and Paley and Lord Eldon came to possess an existence independent of Nature, and acquired the power of turning all her good purpose to nought, is one of those questions which we can hardly refrain from asking, but which it would be obviously unkind to press. Still less would it be to the purpose to ask how this beneficent Nature is related to the purely neutral Necessity, which is 'the mother of the world,' or how, between the two, such a monstrous birth as the 'prolific fiend' Religion came into existence. The crude incoherence of the whole system is too obvious to require exposition; and yet it is simply an explicit statement of Godwin's theories put forth with inconvenient excess of candour. The absurdities slurred over by the philosopher are thrown into brilliant relief by the poet.
Shelley improved as a poet, and in a degree rarely exemplified in poetry, between 'Queen Mab' and the 'Prometheus'; but even in the 'Prometheus' and his last writings we find a continued reflection of Godwin's characteristic views. Everywhere as much a prophet as a poet, Shelley is always announcing, sometimes in exquisite poetry, the advent of the millennium. His conception of the millennium, if we try to examine precisely what it is, always embodies the same thought, that man is to be made perfect by the complete dissolution of all the traditional ties by which the race is at present bound together. In the passage which originally formed the conclusion to the 'Prometheus,' the 'Spirit of the Hour' reveals the approaching consummation. The whole passage is a fine one, and it is almost a shame to quote fragments; but we may briefly observe that in the coming world everybody is to say exactly what he thinks; women are to be—