Shelley has often been criticized regarding his love life. Every student of Shelley is familiar with his capricious and insensitive behavior toward the loves in his life. However, what many students may not realize is that he was an inevitable victim of illusions, and that the only alternative was to give up on lust for life. A passage from a letter he wrote to his friend T.J. Hogg in 1815 will help clarify exactly what I mean.
In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, aestheticians debated about whether the Divine Horticulturalist created a neat and geometrical or a wild and irregular Garden of Eden. The question was of crucial importance to them, because the nature of nature was regarded as the philosophical underpinning for the nature of everything that people should believe, feel and do. The nature of nature had ramifications as to whether people should live by intuition or by reason, whether artists should be rule-bound or spontaneous, whether art of all kinds should be rigid or free-form, whether the ideal human is a rationalist urbanite or a noble savage, whether society should be an orderly hierarchy or a diverse democracy, and whether standards of judgment should be objective or subjective.
