ja m e s c h a n d l e r What is mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, is progressive, and admits of gradual improvement: what is not mechanical or definite, but depends on genius, taste, and feeling, very soon becomes stationary, or retrograde, and loses more than it gains by transfusion (vol i, p 161) This formulation, so much at odds with what I have described as the HumeSmith-Godwin-Shelley line on sentimental progress, seems in its turn to be contradicted outright in the text on which Shelley drew when he wrote A Defence of Poetry, A Philosophical View of Reform, the text in which Shelley elaborated his own account of what he called “the spirit of the age” six years before Hazlitt’s volume appeared The View, of which Shelley finished three sections, concludes its first section with the famous paragraph about how poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but then goes on to shape a transition to what are called “less abstracted considerations” with an appeal in the form of a question: “Has there not been [asks Shelley] and is there not in England a desire of change arising from the profound sentiment of the exceeding inefficiency of the existing institutions to provide for the physical and intellectual happiness of the people?”10 This question introduces the second of the essay’s three parts, titled “On the Sentiment of the Necessity of Change,” in which Shelley attempts both to “state and examine the present condition of this desire,” and “to elucidate its causes and its object.”11 Here, in short, Shelley turns to the language of sentiment – of desire, affect, and feeling – to describe the very engine of social progress The progress of society is a function of the state of its sentiment, and the state of its sentiment is a function of the state of its poetic activity Shelley even seems to suggest that poetry’s sentimental advance counts for more than the advances of the useful arts For him, the constitutional experiment under way in America is the embodiment of the principle of utility – and the progress of the USA in that vein has been more dramatic than any prior nation’s But Shelley explicitly states his preference for England’s long-term chances, exactly because of England’s advances in poetry, its fostering of writers who are able to represent the general will as it should be, rather than just producing an efficient mechanical representation of the will as it is They reflect the normative dimension of sentiment that discloses the inadequacy of existing institutions to general human wellbeing Intriguingly, then, between Hazlitt and Shelley, perhaps the two earliest explicators of the notion of the spirit of the age in the age of progress, we find some sharp discrepancies Though each writer’s work embodies contradictions of its own, these positions on the progress of poetry, on the 142 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008