V.

The main direction of our studies has been indicated in the preceding

lectures to such an extent that from this point forward our customary

review may be omitted. In examining the _Prometheus_ of Aeschylus we

have found three particulars, in which not only Aeschylus, but his

entire contemporary time shows complete unconsciousness of the most

precious and essential belongings of personality. These particulars

were, (1), the absolute impossibility of growth, implicitly affirmed

of the gods and explicitly affirmed of men in the passages which were

read; (2) the awkwardness of Jove's apparatus of power which included

a minister for every kind of act--as contrasted with the elasticity

and much-in-little which each man must perceive in regarding the

action of his own mind; and (3) the gross and purely physical

character of the punishments used by Jove to break the spirit of

Prometheus. It was contended, you remember, that if the audience of

Aeschylus had acquired that direct way of looking phenomena in the

face, which is one of the incidents of our modern personality, they

would have perceived such an inadequacy between the thunders and

earthquakes of Jove, on the one hand, and the immortal spirit of a

Titan and a god like Prometheus, on the other, that the play, instead

of being a religious and impressive spectacle to them, as it doubtless

was, would have been simply a matter of ridicule, or at best one of

those mere _dilettante_ entertainments where of our own free will we

forgive the grossest violations of common sense and propriety for the

sake of the music or the scenery with which they are associated, as

for example at the Italian opera, or the Christmas pantomime.

This last particular brings us directly upon Shelley's play of the

_Prometheus Unbound_.

We have seen that Aeschylus had a fit audience for this fable, and was

working upon emotions which are as deep as religion; but now, when we

come down 2300 years to a time from which the Aeschylean religious

beliefs have long exhaled, and when the enormous growth of personality

has quite rolled away the old lumpish terror that stood before the

cave of the physical and darkened it, in such a time it would, of

course, be truly amazing if a man like Shelley should have elaborated

this same old Prometheus fable into a lyrical drama in the expectation

of shaking the souls of men with this same old machinery of thunder,

whirlwind and earthquake.

Such a mistake--the mistake of tearing the old fable forcibly away

from its old surroundings, and of setting it in modern thoughts before

modern men, would be much the same with that which Emerson has noted

in his poem _Each and All_:

"I thought of the sparrow's note from heaven,

Singing at dawn on the alder bough;

I brought him home in his nest at even;

He sings the song, but it pleases not now,

For I did not bring home the river and sky--

He sang to my ear, they sang to my eye.

The delicate shells lay on the shore;

Bubbles of the latest wave

Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;

And the bellowing of the savage sea

Greeted their safe escape to me.

I wiped away the weeds and foam

I fetched my sea-born treasures home;

But the poor, unsightly, noisome things

Had left their beauty on the shore

With the sun and the sand and the wild sea-shore."

Accordingly, it is instructive, as we look into Shelley's work, to

observe how this inability of his to bring home the river and the sky

along with the sparrow--this inability to bring a Greek-hearted

audience to listen to his Greek fable--operated to infuse a certain

tang of insincerity, of dilettantism, whenever he attempts to

reproduce upon us the old terrors of thunder and lightning which

Aeschylus found so effective. We--we moderns--cannot for our lives help

seeing the man in his shirt-sleeves who is turning the crank of the

thunder-mill behind the scenes; nay, we are inclined to ask with a

certain proud indignation, How is it that you wish us to tremble at

this mere resinous lightning, when we have seen a man (not a Titan nor

a god), one of ourselves go forth into a thunder-storm and send his

kite up into the very bosom thereof, and fairly entice the lightning

by his wit to come and perch upon his finger, and be the tame bird of

him and his fellows thereafter and forever? But, secondly, it is still

more conclusive upon our present point, of the different demands made

by the personality of our time from that of Aeschylus, to observe how

Shelley's own sense of this difference, his own modern instinct, has

led him to make most material alterations of the old fable, not only

increasing the old list of physical torments with a number that are

purely spiritual and modern, but also by dignifying at once the

character of Prometheus and the catastrophe of the play with that

enormous motive of forgiveness which seems to be the largest outcome

of the developed personality. Many of you are aware of the scholastic

belief that the _Prometheus Bound_ of Aeschylus was but the middle play

of a trilogy, and that the last showed us a compromise effected

between Prometheus and Jove, according to which Prometheus reveals the

fatal secret concerning Jove's marriage, and Jove makes a new league

of amity with the Titan. We have a note of this change in treatment in

the very opening lines of Shelley's play--which I now beg to set

before you in the briefest possible sketch. Scene I. of Act I. opens

according to the stage direction--upon _A ravine of icy rocks in the

Indian Caucasus: Prometheus is discovered bound to the precipice:

Panthea and Ione are seated at his feet: time, night: during the

scene, morning slowly breaks_. Prometheus begins to speak at once. I

read only here and there a line selected with special reference to

showing the change of treatment I have indicated as due to that

intenser instinct of personality which Shelley shared in common with

his contemporaries over Aeschylus and his contemporaries.

Prometheus exclaims:

"Monarch of gods and demons, and all spirits

But one, who throng those bright and rolling worlds

Which thou and I alone of living things

Behold with sleepless eyes!...

Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,

And moments aye divided by keen pangs

Till they seemed years, torture and solitude,

Scorn and despair,--these are mine empire,

More glorious far than that which thou surveyest

From thine unenvied throne!"

Here we have the purely spiritual torments of "solitude, scorn and

despair" set before us; though Shelley retains and even multiplies the

physical torments of Aeschylus. A few lines further on, in this same

long opening speech of Prometheus, we have them thus described:

"Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain,

Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb,

Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life.

The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears

Of their moon-freezing crystals; the bright chains

Eat with their burning cold into my bones.

... The earthquake fiends are charged

To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds

When the rocks split and close again behind;

While from their wild abysses howling throng

The genii of the storm, urging the rage

Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail."

And presently, when after the repulse of Mercury Jove begins to stir

up new terrors, we hear Ione exclaiming:

"O, sister, look! white fire

Has cloven to the roots yon huge snow-loaded cedar;

How fearfully God's thunder howls behind!"

But even in Shelley's array of these terrors we perceive a cunning

outcrop of modernness in a direction which I have not yet mentioned

but which we will have frequent occasion to notice when we come to

read the modern novel together; and that is in the detail of the

description Aeschylus paints these conclusions with a big brush, and

three sweeps of it; Shelley itemizes them.

It is worth while observing too, that the same spirit of detail in

modern criticism forces us to convict Shelley here of an inconsistency

in his scene; for how could this "snow-loaded cedar" of Ione exist

with propriety in a scene which Prometheus himself has just described

as "without herb, insect, or beast, or sound of life?"

The same instinct of modernness both in the spirituality of the

torment and in the minuteness of its description displays itself a

little farther on in the curse of Prometheus. Prometheus tells us in

this same opening speech that long ago he uttered a certain awful

curse against Jove which he now desires to recall; but it would seem

that in order to recall it he wishes to hear the exact words of it.

"What was that curse?"--he exclaims at the end of the speech; "for ye

all heard me speak." To this question we have page after page of

replies from five voices--namely, the Voice of the Mountains, of the

Springs, of the Air, of the Whirlwinds and of the Earth--embodying

such a mass of falsetto sublimity that Shelley himself would surely

have drawn his pen through the whole, if he had lived into the term of

manhood.

Finally the whole awkward device for getting the curse of Prometheus

before the reader is consummated by raising up the phantasm of Jupiter

which repeats the curse, word for word.

In truth, Shelley appears always to have labored under an essential

immaturity: it is very possible that if he had lived a hundred years

he would never have become a man: he was penetrated with modern ideas,

but penetrated as a boy would be, crudely, overmuch, and with a

constant tendency to the extravagant and illogical: so that I call him

the modern boy.

These considerations quite cover the remaining three acts of his

_Prometheus Unbound_ and render it unnecessary for me to quote from

them in support of the passages already cited.

The first act contains, indeed, nearly the substance of the whole

drama. Act II contains no important motive except the visit of Asia

and Panthea to Demogorgon under the earth. In the third act we have a

view of Jove surrounded by his ministers; but in the midst of a short

speech to them he is suddenly swept into hell for everlasting

punishment. Here, of course, Shelley makes a complete departure from

the old story of the compromise between Jove and Prometheus; Shelley

makes Prometheus scornfully reject such a compromise and allow Jove to

go down to his doom. Hercules then unbinds Prometheus who repairs to a

certain exquisite interlunar cave and there dwells in tranquillity

with his beloved Asia.

The rest of Act III. is filled with long descriptions of the change

which comes upon the world with the dethronement of Jove. Act IV. is

the most amazing piece of surplusage in literature; the catastrophe

has been reached long ago in the third act. Jove is in eternal duress,

Prometheus has been liberated and has gone with Asia and Panthea to

his eternal paradise above the earth, and a final radiant picture of

the reawakening of man and nature under the new regime has closed up

the whole with the effect of a transformation-scene. Yet, upon all

this, Shelley drags in Act IV. which is simply leaden in action and

color alongside of Act III. and in which the voices of unseen spirits,

the chorus of Hours, Jove, Panthea, Demogorgon, the Earth and the Moon

pelt each other with endless sweetish speeches that rain like

ineffectual comfits in a carnival of silliness. For example, a Voice

of Unseen Spirits cries:

"Bright clouds float in heaven,

Dew-stars gleam on earth,

Waves assemble on ocean:

They are gathered and driven

By the storm of delight, by the panic of glee!

They shake with emotion,

They dance in their mirth.

But where are ye?

The pine boughs are singing

Old songs with new gladness;

The billows and fountains

Fresh music are flinging

Like the notes of a spirit from land and from sea;

The storms mock the mountains

With the thunder of gladness.

But where are ye?"

The people thus inquired for, being the chorus of Hours, sleepily

reply:

"The voice of the spirits of air and of earth

Has drawn back the figured curtain of sleep

Which covered our being and darkened our birth

In the deep."