Note 178 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

4. In England it was due above all to Shelley that the very age of reaction was confronted with unbelief in lyric form. His immature Queen Mab was vital enough with conviction to serve as an inspiration to a whole host of unlettered freethinkers not only in its own generation but in the next. Its notes preserved, and greatly expanded, the tract entitled The Necessity of Atheism, for which he was expelled from Oxford; and against his will it became a people’s book, the law refusing him copyright in his own work, on the memorable principle that there could be no “protection” for a book setting forth pernicious opinions. Whether he might not in later life, had he survived, have passed to a species of mystic Christianity, reacting like Coleridge, but with a necessary difference, is a question raised by parts of the Hellas. Gladstone seems to have thought that he had in him such a potentiality. But Shelley’s work, as done, sufficed to keep for radicalism and rationalism the crown of song as against the final Tory orthodoxy178 of the elderly Wordsworth and of Southey; and Coleridge’s zeal for (amended) dogma came upon him after his hour of poetic transfiguration was past.