On the 12th of March, 1818, Shelley quitted England, never to return.
His principal motive was the hope that his health would be improved by a
milder climate; he suffered very much during the winter previous to his
emigration, and this decided his vacillating purpose. In December, 1817,
he had written from Marlow to a friend, saying:
'My health has been materially worse. My feelings at intervals are of a
deadly and torpid kind, or awakened to such a state of unnatural and
keen excitement that, only to instance the organ of sight, I find the
very blades of grass and the boughs of distant trees present themselves
to me with microscopic distinctness. Towards evening I sink into a state
of lethargy and inanimation, and often remain for hours on the sofa
between sleep and waking, a prey to the most painful irritability of
thought. Such, with little intermission, is my condition. The hours
devoted to study are selected with vigilant caution from among these
periods of endurance. It is not for this that I think of travelling to
Italy, even if I knew that Italy would relieve me. But I have
experienced a decisive pulmonary attack; and although at present it has
passed away without any considerable vestige of its existence, yet this
symptom sufficiently shows the true nature of my disease to be
consumptive. It is to my advantage that this malady is in its nature
slow, and, if one is sufficiently alive to its advances, is susceptible
of cure from a warm climate. In the event of its assuming any decided
shape, IT WOULD BE MY DUTY to go to Italy without delay. It is not mere
health, but life, that I should seek, and that not for my own sake--I
feel I am capable of trampling on all such weakness; but for the sake of
those to whom my life may be a source of happiness, utility, security,
and honour, and to some of whom my death might be all that is the
reverse.'
In almost every respect his journey to Italy was advantageous. He left
behind friends to whom he was attached; but cares of a thousand kinds,
many springing from his lavish generosity, crowded round him in his
native country, and, except the society of one or two friends, he had no
compensation. The climate caused him to consume half his existence in
helpless suffering. His dearest pleasure, the free enjoyment of the
scenes of Nature, was marred by the same circumstance.
He went direct to Italy, avoiding even Paris, and did not make any pause
till he arrived at Milan. The first aspect of Italy enchanted Shelley;
it seemed a garden of delight placed beneath a clearer and brighter
heaven than any he had lived under before. He wrote long descriptive
letters during the first year of his residence in Italy, which, as
compositions, are the most beautiful in the world, and show how truly he
appreciated and studied the wonders of Nature and Art in that divine
land.
The poetical spirit within him speedily revived with all the power and
with more than all the beauty of his first attempts. He meditated three
subjects as the groundwork for lyrical dramas. One was the story of
Tasso; of this a slight fragment of a song of Tasso remains. The other
was one founded on the Book of Job, which he never abandoned in idea,
but of which no trace remains among his papers. The third was the
"Prometheus Unbound". The Greek tragedians were now his most familiar
companions in his wanderings, and the sublime majesty of Aeschylus
filled him with wonder and delight. The father of Greek tragedy does not
possess the pathos of Sophocles, nor the variety and tenderness of
Euripides; the interest on which he founds his dramas is often elevated
above human vicissitudes into the mighty passions and throes of gods and
demi-gods: such fascinated the abstract imagination of Shelley.
We spent a month at Milan, visiting the Lake of Como during that
interval. Thence we passed in succession to Pisa, Leghorn, the Baths of
Lucca, Venice, Este, Rome, Naples, and back again to Rome, whither we
returned early in March, 1819. During all this time Shelley meditated
the subject of his drama, and wrote portions of it. Other poems were
composed during this interval, and while at the Bagni di Lucca he
translated Plato's "Symposium". But, though he diversified his studies,
his thoughts centred in the Prometheus. At last, when at Rome, during a
bright and beautiful Spring, he gave up his whole time to the
composition. The spot selected for his study was, as he mentions in his
preface, the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. These are
little known to the ordinary visitor at Rome. He describes them in a
letter, with that poetry and delicacy and truth of description which
render his narrated impressions of scenery of unequalled beauty and
interest.
At first he completed the drama in three acts. It was not till several
months after, when at Florence, that he conceived that a fourth act, a
sort of hymn of rejoicing in the fulfilment of the prophecies with
regard to Prometheus, ought to be added to complete the composition.
The prominent feature of Shelley's theory of the destiny of the human
species was that evil is not inherent in the system of the creation, but
an accident that might be expelled. This also forms a portion of
Christianity: God made earth and man perfect, till he, by his fall,
'Brought death into the world and all our woe.'
Shelley believed that mankind had only to will that there should be no
evil, and there would be none. It is not my part in these Notes to
notice the arguments that have been urged against this opinion, but to
mention the fact that he entertained it, and was indeed attached to it
with fervent enthusiasm. That man could be so perfectionized as to be
able to expel evil from his own nature, and from the greater part of the
creation, was the cardinal point of his system. And the subject he loved
best to dwell on was the image of One warring with the Evil Principle,
oppressed not only by it, but by all--even the good, who were deluded
into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity; a victim full of
fortitude and hope and the spirit of triumph emanating from a reliance
in the ultimate omnipotence of Good. Such he had depicted in his last
poem, when he made Laon the enemy and the victim of tyrants. He now took
a more idealized image of the same subject. He followed certain
classical authorities in figuring Saturn as the good principle, Jupiter
the usurping evil one, and Prometheus as the regenerator, who, unable to
bring mankind back to primitive innocence, used knowledge as a weapon to
defeat evil, by leading mankind, beyond the state wherein they are
sinless through ignorance, to that in which they are virtuous through
wisdom. Jupiter punished the temerity of the Titan by chaining him to a
rock of Caucasus, and causing a vulture to devour his still-renewed
heart. There was a prophecy afloat in heaven portending the fall of
Jove, the secret of averting which was known only to Prometheus; and the
god offered freedom from torture on condition of its being communicated
to him. According to the mythological story, this referred to the
offspring of Thetis, who was destined to be greater than his father.
Prometheus at last bought pardon for his crime of enriching mankind with
his gifts, by revealing the prophecy. Hercules killed the vulture, and
set him free; and Thetis was married to Peleus, the father of Achilles.
Shelley adapted the catastrophe of this story to his peculiar views. The
son greater than his father, born of the nuptials of Jupiter and Thetis,
was to dethrone Evil, and bring back a happier reign than that of
Saturn. Prometheus defies the power of his enemy, and endures centuries
of torture; till the hour arrives when Jove, blind to the real event,
but darkly guessing that some great good to himself will flow, espouses
Thetis. At the moment, the Primal Power of the world drives him from his
usurped throne, and Strength, in the person of Hercules, liberates
Humanity, typified in Prometheus, from the tortures generated by evil
done or suffered. Asia, one of the Oceanides, is the wife of
Prometheus--she was, according to other mythological interpretations,
the same as Venus and Nature. When the benefactor of mankind is
liberated, Nature resumes the beauty of her prime, and is united to her
husband, the emblem of the human race, in perfect and happy union. In
the Fourth Act, the Poet gives further scope to his imagination, and
idealizes the forms of creation--such as we know them, instead of such
as they appeared to the Greeks. Maternal Earth, the mighty parent, is
superseded by the Spirit of the Earth, the guide of our planet through
the realms of sky; while his fair and weaker companion and attendant,
the Spirit of the Moon, receives bliss from the annihilation of Evil in
the superior sphere.
Shelley develops, more particularly in the lyrics of this drama, his
abstruse and imaginative theories with regard to the Creation. It
requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as his own to understand the
mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem. They elude the ordinary
reader by their abstraction and delicacy of distinction, but they are
far from vague. It was his design to write prose metaphysical essays on
the nature of Man, which would have served to explain much of what is
obscure in his poetry; a few scattered fragments of observations and
remarks alone remain. He considered these philosophical views of Mind
and Nature to be instinct with the intensest spirit of poetry.
More popular poets clothe the ideal with familiar and sensible imagery.
Shelley loved to idealize the real--to gift the mechanism of the
material universe with a soul and a voice, and to bestow such also on
the most delicate and abstract emotions and thoughts of the mind.
Sophocles was his great master in this species of imagery.
I find in one of his manuscript books some remarks on a line in the
"Oedipus Tyrannus", which show at once the critical subtlety of
Shelley's mind, and explain his apprehension of those 'minute and remote
distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the
living beings which surround us,' which he pronounces, in the letter
quoted in the note to the "Revolt of Islam", to comprehend all that is
sublime in man.
'In the Greek Shakespeare, Sophocles, we find the image,
Pollas d' odous elthonta phrontidos planois:
a line of almost unfathomable depth of poetry; yet how simple are the
images in which it is arrayed!
"Coming to many ways in the wanderings of careful thought."
If the words odous and planois had not been used, the line might have
been explained in a metaphorical instead of an absolute sense, as we say
"WAYS and means," and "wanderings" for error and confusion. But they
meant literally paths or roads, such as we tread with our feet; and
wanderings, such as a man makes when he loses himself in a desert, or
roams from city to city--as Oedipus, the speaker of this verse, was
destined to wander, blind and asking charity. What a picture does this
line suggest of the mind as a wilderness of intricate paths, wide as the
universe, which is here made its symbol; a world within a world which he
who seeks some knowledge with respect to what he ought to do searches
throughout, as he would search the external universe for some valued
thing which was hidden from him upon its surface.'
In reading Shelley's poetry, we often find similar verses, resembling,
but not imitating the Greek in this species of imagery; for, though he
adopted the style, he gifted it with that originality of form and
colouring which sprung from his own genius.
In the "Prometheus Unbound", Shelley fulfils the promise quoted from a
letter in the Note on the "Revolt of Islam". (While correcting the
proof-sheets of that poem, it struck me that the poet had indulged in an
exaggerated view of the evils of restored despotism; which, however
injurious and degrading, were less openly sanguinary than the triumph of
anarchy, such as it appeared in France at the close of the last century.
But at this time a book, "Scenes of Spanish Life", translated by
Lieutenant Crawford from the German of Dr. Huber, of Rostock, fell into
my hands. The account of the triumph of the priests and the serviles,
after the French invasion of Spain in 1823, bears a strong and frightful
resemblance to some of the descriptions of the massacre of the patriots
in the "Revolt of Islam".) The tone of the composition is calmer and
more majestic, the poetry more perfect as a whole, and the imagination
displayed at once more pleasingly beautiful and more varied and daring.
The description of the Hours, as they are seen in the cave of
Demogorgon, is an instance of this--it fills the mind as the most
charming picture--we long to see an artist at work to bring to our view
the
'cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds
Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands
A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.
Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,
And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:
Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink
With eager lips the wind of their own speed,
As if the thing they loved fled on before,
And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks
Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all
Sweep onward.'
Through the whole poem there reigns a sort of calm and holy spirit of
love; it soothes the tortured, and is hope to the expectant, till the
prophecy is fulfilled, and Love, untainted by any evil, becomes the law
of the world.
England had been rendered a painful residence to Shelley, as much by the
sort of persecution with which in those days all men of liberal opinions
were visited, and by the injustice he had lately endured in the Court of
Chancery, as by the symptoms of disease which made him regard a visit to
Italy as necessary to prolong his life. An exile, and strongly impressed
with the feeling that the majority of his countrymen regarded him with
sentiments of aversion such as his own heart could experience towards
none, he sheltered himself from such disgusting and painful thoughts in
the calm retreats of poetry, and built up a world of his own--with the
more pleasure, since he hoped to induce some one or two to believe that
the earth might become such, did mankind themselves consent. The charm
of the Roman climate helped to clothe his thoughts in greater beauty
than they had ever worn before. And, as he wandered among the ruins made
one with Nature in their decay, or gazed on the Praxitelean shapes that
throng the Vatican, the Capitol, and the palaces of Rome, his soul
imbibed forms of loveliness which became a portion of itself. There are
many passages in the "Prometheus" which show the intense delight he
received from such studies, and give back the impression with a beauty
of poetical description peculiarly his own. He felt this, as a poet must
feel when he satisfies himself by the result of his labours; and he
wrote from Rome, 'My "Prometheus Unbound" is just finished, and in a
month or two I shall send it. It is a drama, with characters and
mechanism of a kind yet unattempted; and I think the execution is better
than any of my former attempts.'
I may mention, for the information of the more critical reader, that the
verbal alterations in this edition of "Prometheus" are made from a list
of errata written by Shelley himself.