Flowers of Freethought (First Series)Foote, G. W. (George William)
Religion
Flowers of Freethought (First Series)
Foote, G. W. (George William)
Free thought
* On August 4, 1892, the centenary of Shelley's birth was
celebrated at Horsham, where it is intended to found a
Shelley Library, if not a Shelley Museum. The celebrants
were a motley collection. They were all concealing the
poet's principles and paying honor to a bogus Shelley. A
more honest celebration took place in the evening at the
Hall of Science, Old-street, London, E.C. Six or seven
hundred people were addressed by Dr. Furnivall, Gr. B. Shaw,
and G. W. Foote; and every pointed reference to Shelley's
religious, social, and political heresy was enthusiastically
applauded.
Charles Darwin, the Newton of biology, was an Agnostic--which is only a
respectable synonym for an Atheist. The more he looked for God the
less he could find him. Yet the corpse of this great "infidel" lies in
Westminster Abbey, We need not wonder, therefore, that Christians and
even parsons are on the Shelley Centenary committee, or that Mr.
Edmund Gosse was chosen to officiate as high pontiff at the Horsham
celebration. Mr. Gosse is a young man with a promising past--to borrow a
witticism from Heine. In the old _Examiner_ days he hung about the army
of revolt. Since then he has become a bit of a Philistine, though he
still affects a superior air, and retains a pretty way of turning a
sentence. The selection of such a man to pronounce the eulogy on Shelley
was in keeping with the whole proceedings at Horsham, where everybody
was lauding a "bogus Shelley," as Mr. Shaw remarked at the Hall of
Science celebration.
Mr. Gosse was good enough to tell the Horsham celebrants that "it
was not the poet who was attacked" in Shelley's case, but "the
revolutionist, the enemy of kings and priests, the extravagant
and paradoxical humanitarian." Mr. Gosse generously called this an
"intelligent aversion," and in another sense than his it undoubtedly was
so. The classes, interests, and abuses that were threatened by Shelley's
principles, acted with the intelligence of self-preservation. They gave
him an ill name and would gladly have hung him. Yes, it was, beyond all
doubt, an "intelligent aversion." Byron only dallied with the false and
foolish beliefs of his age, but Shelley meant mischief. This accounts
for the hatred shown towards him by orthodoxy and privilege.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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