We may compare with this a famous utterance of another aristocrat, equally a supreme artist, equally in rebellion against the whole fabric of conventional civilisation, whose “passion for reforming the world” was not less than Tolstoy’s, but who differed from him in the possession of a wider and more complete sense of values and a mind not riven and distorted by a late conversion. “The whole objection of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive and subjugate one another. “But poetry acts in a diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful. It exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed.” It is curious how the insertion of particular names here seems to weaken the argument. The world, we feel fairly certain, would be on the whole much the same even if there had been no Boccaccio and no Lord Bacon. Things would not be very different, some people will think, even if none of these authors had ever bestirred themselves to write. Shakespeare, as so often, would perhaps be counted an exception. But this sense that there are, after all, very few poets who individually make much difference is not in the least an objection to Shelley’s main thesis. We could bale a vast amount of water out of the sea without making any apparent difference to it, but this would not prove that it does not consist of water. Even if the removal of the influence of all the poets whose names we know made no appreciable difference in human affairs, it would still be true that the enlargement of the mind, the widening of the sphere of human sensibility, is brought about through poetry.