PROMETHEUS.

* * * * The truth thou'lt know

In fitting season; now it lies concealed

In deepest darkness; for relenting Jove

Himself must woo this secret from my breast.

(This secret--so it is told in the old myths--is that Jove is to meet

his own downfall through an unfortunate marriage, and Prometheus is in

possession of the details which would enable Jove to avoid the doom.)

After a choral hymn, recommending submission to Jove, we have suddenly

the grotesque apparition of Io upon the stage. Io had been beloved by

Jove; but the jealousy of Hera, or Juno, had transformed her into a

cow, and had doomed her to wander over the world stung by an

inexpugnable gadfly, and watched by the hundred-eyed Argus. Thus,

suddenly, upon the spectacle of a man suffering from the hatred of

Jove, Aeschylus brings the spectacle of a woman suffering from the love

of Jove. Io enters with this fine outburst:

What land is this? What race of mortals

Owns this desert? Who art thou,

Rock-bound with these wintry fetters,

And for what crime tortured thus?

Worn and weary with far travel,

Tell me where my feet have borne me!

O pain! pain! pain! it stings and goads me again,

The fateful gadfly!--save me, O Earth!--avaunt,

Thou horrible shadow of the earth-born Argus!

Could not the grave close up thy hundred eyes,

But thou must come,

Haunting my path with thy suspicious look,

Unhoused from Hades?

Avaunt! avaunt! why wilt thou hound my track,

The famished wanderer on the waste sea-shore?

After much talk, Io now relates her mournful story, and, supported by

the Chorus, persuades Prometheus to prophesy the very eventful future

which awaits her when her wanderings are over. In this prophetic

account of her travels, Aeschylus gives a soul-expanding review of land

after land according to the geographic and ethnic notions of his time;

and here Mr. Blackie, whose translation of the Prometheus I have been

partly quoting from, sometimes reproduces his author in very large and

musical measures. For example, Prometheus chants:

When thou hast crossed the narrow stream that parts

The continents, to the far flame-faced East

Thou shalt proceed, the highway of the sun;

Then cross the sounding ocean, till thou reach

Cisthene and the Gorgon plains, where dwell

Phorcys' three daughters, maids with frosty eld,

White as the swan, with one eye and one tooth

Shared by the three; them Phoebus, beamy-bright

Beholds not, nor the nightly moon. Near them

Their winged sisters dwell, the Gorgons dire,

Man-hating monsters, snaky-locked, whom eye

Of mortal ne'er might look upon and live.

* * * * One more sight remains

That fills the eye with horror. * * *

The sharp-beaked Griffins, hounds of Jove, avoid,

Fell dogs that bark not; and the one-eyed host

Of Arimaspian horsemen with swift hoofs

Beating the banks of golden-rolling Pluto.

A distant land, a swarthy people next

Receives thee: near the fountains of the sun

They dwell by Ethiop's wave. This river trace

Until thy weary feet shall reach the pass

Whence from the Bybline heights the sacred Nile

Pours his salubrious flood. The winding wave

Thence to triangled Egypt guides thee, where

A distant home awaits thee, fated mother

Of an unstoried race.

In this strain Prometheus continues to foretell the adventures of Io

until her son Epaphus, monarch of Egypt, is born, who will

be--through the fifty daughters celebrated in _The Suppliants_ of

Aeschylus--the ancestor of Hercules, which Hercules is to be the

deliverer of Prometheus himself.

Then in a frenzy of pain, Io departs, while the Chorus bursts into a

hymn deploring such ill-matched unions as that of Io with Jove, and

extolling marriage between equals.

After the exit of Io--to finish our summary of the play--the action

hastens to the end; the chorus implores Prometheus to submit:

presently, Hermes or Mercury appears, and tauntingly counsels

surrender, only to be as tauntingly repulsed by Prometheus; and, after

a sharp passage of wits between these two, accompanied by indignant

outbursts from the Chorus at the pitilessness of Hermes, the play

ceases with a speech from Prometheus describing the new punishment of

Jove:

Now in deed and not in discourse,

The firm earth quakes.

Deep and loud the ambient thunder

Bellows, and the flaring lightning

Wreathes his fiery curls around me

And the whirlwind rolls his dust,

And the winds from rival regions

Rush in elemental strife,

And the sky is destroyed with the sea.

Surely now the tyrant gathers

All his hoarded wrath to whelm me.

Mighty Mother, worshipped Themis,

Circling Aether that diffusest

Light, the common joy of all,

Thou beholdest these my wrongs!

Thus in the crash of elements the play ends. Fortunately our purpose

with this huge old story thus treated by Aeschylus, lays us under no

necessity to involve ourselves in endless discussions of the

Sun-myths, of the connection between ox-horned Io and the sacred

Egyptian cow Isis; of moral interpretations which vary with every

standpoint. The extent to which these _do_ vary is amusingly

illustrated in an interpretation of the true significance of

Prometheus, which I recently happened to light upon, made by a certain

Mr. Newton, who published an elaborate work a few years ago in defence

of the strictly vegetable diet. Mr. Newton would not have us misapply

fire to cookery; and in this line of thought he interprets the old

fable that Prometheus stole fire from heaven and was punished by being

chained to Caucasus with a vulture to gnaw his liver. The simple fact,

says our vegetarian, is that "Prometheus first taught the use of

animal food, and of fire with which to render it more pleasing, etc.,

to the taste. Jupiter, and the rest of the gods, foreseeing the

consequences of the inventions" (these consequences being all manner

of gastric and other diseases which Newton attributes to the use of

animal food), "were amused or irritated at the short-sighted devices

of the ... creature, and left him to experience the sad effects of

them." In short, the chaining to a rock, with a vulture to gnaw his

liver, is simply a very satisfactory symbol for dyspepsia.

Untroubled by these entanglements, which thus reach from Max Muller,

with his Sun-wanderings, to the dyspeptic theory of our vegetarian;

our present concern is less with what Aeschylus or his fable meant than

with the frame of mind of the average man who sat in his audience, and

who listened to these matters with favor, who accepted this picture of

gods and men without rebellion. My argument is, that if this average

man's sense of personality had not been most feeble he could _not_

have accepted this picture at all. Permit me, then, to specify three

or four of the larger features of it before we go on to contrast the

treatment of this fable by Aeschylus with that by Shelley and Taylor in

a later age.

In the first place, then, since we are mainly meditating upon the

growth of human personality, I beg you to observe the complete lack of

all provision for such growth, either among the gods or the men of

this presentation. Consider Hephaestus, for example, or Vulcan. Vulcan

may hammer away, immortal as he is, for a million aeons upon the

thunderbolts of Jove; he may fashion and forge until he has exhausted

the whole science and art of offensive and defensive armament; but how

much better off is Vulcan for that? he can never step upon a higher

plane,--he is to all eternity simply Vulcan, armorer to Jove. And so

Hermes or Mercury may carry messages eternally, but no more; his

faculty and apparatus go to that end and no farther. But these

limitations are intolerable to the modern personality. The very

conception of personality seems to me to imply a conception of growth.

If I do one thing to-day, another to-morrow, I am twice as much

to-morrow as I was to-day, by virtue of the new thing; or, even if I

do only the same thing to-morrow that I did to-day, I do it

easier,--that is, with a less expenditure of force, which leaves me a

little surplus; and by as much as this surplus (which I can apply to

something else), I am more than I was yesterday. This "more"

represents the growth which I said was implied in the very conception

of personality, of the continuous individual.

Now the feeling of all this appears to be just as completely asleep in

Aeschylus himself and in all his precedent old Greek theogonists as it

is in the most witless boor who gazes open-mouthed at the gigantic

Prometheus. But if we here descend from the gods, to the men, of this

picture, we find Prometheus almost in terms asserting this absence of

personality among the men whom he taught which we have just found by

implication among the gods who tortured him.

You will remember the lines I read from the first long speech of

Prometheus, in which he describes the utterly brutish, crawling

cave-dwellers to whom he communicated the first idea of every useful

art. The denial of all power in man himself, once he was created, of

originating these inventions--that is, of growing--that is, of

personality--is complete.

I find nothing so subtly and inconsolably mournful among all the

explicit miseries of the Greek mythology as this fixity of nature in

the god or the man, by which the being is suspended, as it were, at a

certain point of growth, there to hang forever. And in this view the

whole multitudinous people, divine and human, of the whole Greek

cyclics, seem to me as if sculptured in a half relief upon the black

marble wall of their fate--in half relief because but half gods and

half men, who in the lack of personality cannot grow, cannot move.

When Keats stands regarding the figures sculptured upon the Grecian

urn, it is only a cunning sign of the unspeakable misery of his own

life that he finds the youth happy because though he can never succeed

in his chase he can never fall any farther behind in it; to Keats'

teased aspiration a certain sense of rest comes out of the very fixity

of a man suspended in marble.

"Fair youth beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss

Though winning near the goal! Yet do not grieve:

She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss,

Forever wilt thou love and she be fair."

A true old Greek despair fills these lines with a sorrow which is all

the more penetrating when we hear it surging out from among the keen

and energetic personalities of modern times,--personalities which will

not accept any youth's happiness of being howsoever near to his love

if that happiness be coupled with the condition that he is never to be

nearer,--personalities which find their whole summary in continuous

growth, increase, movement.

And if we remember that even when the condition of primal man is very

far from the miserable state depicted by Prometheus, the case grows

all the stronger of that Golden Age in which the antique imagination

took great delight, not all unshared, it must be confessed, by later

times, fails to please the modern personality. For example in

Chaucer's poem called _Aetas Prima_, that is, the first or Golden Age,

we have the most engaging picture of man in a pre-Promethean time,

drawn at a far different point of view from that of Prometheus in our

play.

How taking seems this simplicity:

"A blisful lyfe, a peseable and so swete,

Leddyn the peplis in the former age;

Thei helde them paied with the frutes they ete,

Wich that the feldes gafe them by usage;

Thei etyn most hawys and such pownage

And dronken watyr of the colde welle.

Yet was the ground not woundyd with the plough,

But corne upsprange onsowe of mannes hand;

No man yit knew the furous of hys land:

No man yit fier owt of the flynt fand.

No flesche ne wyst offence of hegge or spere;

No coyne ne knew man whiche was false or trewe:

No shyppe yit karfe the wawys grene and blewe:

No marchand yit ne fet owtlandische ware.

Yit were no palys chambris, ne no hallys;

In cavys and in wodes soft and swete

Sleptyn thys blessyd folk withowte wallys

On grasse or levys in parfite joy and quiete.

Unforgyd was the hauberke and the plate;

The lambisshe pepyl, voyd of alle vice,

Hadden noo fantasye to debate,

But eche of hem wold oder well cheriche:

No pride, none envy, none avarice,

No lord, no taylage by no tyrannye,

Humblesse, and pease, good fayth the emprise.

Yit was not Jupiter the likerous,

That first was fadyr of delicacye

Come in thys world, ne Nembroth desirous

To raygne hadde not made hys towrys hyghe.

Alas! alas! now may men weep and crye,

For in owre days is is not but covetyse,

Doublenesse, treson, and envye,

Poysonne, manslawtyr, mordre in sondri wyse."

Surely this is all soothing and enchanting enough; one cannot escape

the amiable complacencies which breathe out from this placid scene;

but what modern man would soberly agree to exchange a single moment of

this keen, breezy, energetic, growing existence of ours for a

Methusaleh's life in this golden land where nature does not offer

enough resistance to educe manhood or to furnish material for art, and

where there is absolutely no room, no chance, no need, no conception

of this personality that if rightly felt makes the humblest life one

long enchantment of the possible. The modern personality confronted

with these pictures, after the first glamour is gone, is much minded

to say, with the sharp-witted Glaucon, in Plato's _Republic_,

according to Jowett: "after all, a state of simplicity is a city of

pigs."

But secondly, the cumbrous apparatus of power with which Aeschylus

presents us in this play is a conception of people not acquainted with

that model of infinite compactness which every man finds in his own

_ego_. Jove, instead of speaking a word and instantly seeing the deed

result, must rely first upon his two ministers, Might and Force, who

in the first scene of our play have hauled in the Titan Prometheus;

these, however, do not suffice, but Hephaestus must be summoned in

order to nail him to the rocks; and Jove cannot even learn whether or

not his prisoner is repentant until Hermes, the messenger, visits

Prometheus and returns. The modern _ego_ which, though one

indivisible, impalpable unit, yet remembers, reasons, imagines, loves,

hates, fears and does a thousand more things all within its little

scope, without appliances or external apparatus--such an _ego_ regards

such a Jove much in the light of that old Spanish monarch in whose

court various duties were so minutely distributed and punctiliously

discharged, that upon a certain occasion (as is related), the monarch

being seated too near the fire, and the proper functionary for

removing him being out of call, his majesty was roasted to death in

the presence of the entire royal household.

And as the third feature of the unpersonality revealed in this play,

consider the fact that it is impossible for the modern reader to find

himself at all properly terror-stricken by the purely physical

paraphernalia of thunder, of storms, of chains, of sharp bolts, and

the like, which constitute the whole resources of Jove for the

punishment of Prometheus.

The modern direct way of looking at things--the perfectly natural

outcome of habit of every man's dealing with a thing for himself and

of first necessarily looking to see what the thing actually is--this

directness of vision cannot help seeing that Prometheus is a god,

that he is immortal, that thunder cannot kill him, that the bolt

through his breast makes no wound, but will repair itself with ease,

that he not only knows all this, but knows further that it is to end

(as Prometheus himself declares in the play), in his own triumph.

Under these circumstances the whole array of whirlwinds and lightnings

become a mere pin-scratch; the whole business is a matter of that

purely physical pain which every man is ashamed to make a noise of. We

can conceive a mere man fronting all these terrors of storm and

thunder with unbowed head and serene countenance, in the consciousness

that the whitest of these lightnings cannot singe an eyelash of his

immortal personality; how, then, can it be expected that we shall be

greatly impressed with the endurance of these ills by a god to whose

greater resistive endowment the whole system of this gross

thrust-and-smite of iron and fire is no more than the momentary tease

of a gnat! To the audience of Aeschylus, not so; they shiver and groan;

they know not themselves.

I do not know how I can better show the grossness of this conception

of pain than by opposing to it a subtile modern conception thereof

whose contrast will fairly open out before us the truly prodigious

gulf between the average personality of the time of Aeschylus and that

of ourselves. The modern conception, I refer to is Keats' Ode on

Melancholy; which, indeed, if one may say a word _obiter_, out of the

fullness of one's heart--I am often inclined to think for all-in-all,

that is, for thoughts most mortally compacted, for words which come

forth, each trembling and giving off light like a morning-star, and

for the pure beauty of the spirit and strength and height of the

spirit,--which, I say, for all-in-all, I am often inclined to think,

reaches the highest height yet touched in the lyric line.