Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/184

172 pretty girl in search of 'bread-and-cheese and kisses.' He accepted Mary Godwin as a sort of female seraph, and this essentially vulgar-souled, small-minded, sentimental poseuse exploited him fifty times more ruthlessly than the poor little Methodist. This did not in the least prevent him from a still wilder, if only momentary, aberration over the lovely nullity of Emilia Viviani, the attitudinising Italian girl from whom he was inveigled by the envious Mary, resolute to retain the monopoly of exploitation which she had won by the ruin of a better woman than herself. Intellectually or sexually—it makes little difference which—Shelley was the born child of illusion. To the very last he looked upon Godwin—Godwin, the most sordid of mediocrities—as a great thinker, and his conception of Byron as a supreme artist is one of the gems of criticism. Shelley's true brother is Blake, the inspired Cockney. For both were visionaries and little else. Blake remained one to the close of a long career. Shelley died at thirty, having just discovered in Jane Williams, the wife of a friend of his and another ordinary good-looking Englishwoman (with a baby), a final incarnation of 'the woman's soul,' which (teste Goethe, of all men in the world) 'draws us upwards.'

It is when one comes to compare the visionary of this limited calibre with the visionary on the