ARTS AND SCIENCES AND SOCIAL MILIEU 703
Rome and Modern Italy and our own country*, which had been to him,
'like External Nature, a passion and an enjoyment'; and this personal
experience suggested to Shelley's mind that

'in this sense there may be such a thing as perfectibility in works of
fiction, notwithstanding the concession, often made by the advocates of
human improvement, that perfectibility is a term applicable only to
Science.'1

In endorsing a suggestion which Shelley had thus thrown out in
passing, Bury drew out the implications of Shelley's argument in the
following terms:

'In other words, all the increases of human experience from age to age,
all the speculative adventures of the Intellect, provide the artist in each
succeeding generation with more abundant sources for aesthetic treat-
ment. As years go on, Life in its widest sense offers more and more
materials "which it is the province of the poet to embody and combine".
This is evidently true; and would it not seem to follow that Literature is
not excluded from participating in the common development of Civilisa-
tion?'2

Bury's expansion of Shelley's argument is a legitimate interpretation
of Shelley's words which would assuredly have been certified as correct
by the poet himself if he could have lived to read Bury's book. Yet, in
invoking Poetry in the same breath as External Nature, and describing
their effect on his soul as being 'passion' and 'enjoyment', Shelley was
unconsciously testifying that the sources of the Wild West Wind that
was his tempestuous inspiration were, not 'the speculative adventures
of the Intellect', but 'the Eternal Deep' from whose Primordial Images
Wordsworth derived his intimations of Immortality. From the same
testimony it could be divined that the tale of the years that it had taken
'Life in its widest sense' to accomplish Psyche's task of accumulating the
'materials' for the fund of experience on which every inspired poet drew
amounted to an aeon of an utterly different order of magnitude from the
brief span of some twenty-six centuries or thereabouts that was the
extent of Shelley's own chronological distance from the anonymous
authors of an Homeric Greek Epic which was the chronologically re-
motest poetry within Shelley's conscious ken. The 'passion' and 'enjoy-
ment' that were kindled in Shelley's soul by the works of his brother
poets did not find their fuel in any 'increases of human experience'
during the few thousand years within which a few representatives of the
recently created species of Human Society labelled 'civilizations' had
been rising and falling. It would be as fantastic to look for the sources
of any great poet's inspiration there as it would be to fancy that a blast-
furnace could have been stoked with the contents of a charcoal-burner's
basket. 'The visionary gleam* of which the poet catches his beatific
glimpse in External Nature and in the poetry of his brother poets alike
is the glow of a spiritual fire fed by mighty coal-seams that have been
slowly compacted in the womb of Mother Earth out of the debris of
forests deeply buried there countless ages ago.

i Shelley, ibid., in a footnote. 2 Bury, The Idea of Progress, p. 124.