V.

The baby new to earth and skyWhat time his tender palm is prestAgainst the circle of the breast,Has never thought that 'this is I:'But as he grows he gathers much,And learns the use of 'I' and 'me,'And finds, 'I am not what I see,And other than the things I touch.'So rounds he to a separate mindFrom whence clear memory may begin,As thro' the frame that binds him inHis isolation grows defined.This use may lie in blood and breath,Which else were fruitless of their due,Had man to learn himself anewBeyond the second birth of Death.

The baby new to earth and skyWhat time his tender palm is prestAgainst the circle of the breast,Has never thought that 'this is I:'

But as he grows he gathers much,And learns the use of 'I' and 'me,'And finds, 'I am not what I see,And other than the things I touch.'

So rounds he to a separate mindFrom whence clear memory may begin,As thro' the frame that binds him inHis isolation grows defined.

This use may lie in blood and breath,Which else were fruitless of their due,Had man to learn himself anewBeyond the second birth of Death.

Now if we extend the process of growth here described as of a single child passing through a single life to the collective process of growth effected by humanity from age to age, we have quite clearly the principle whose light I wish to shed upon our comparison of the works I have named. Just as the child learns to know himself—"that I am I"—so man comes in the course of time to feel more and more distinctly I am I; and the growth of this feeling continually uproots his old relations to things and brings about new relations with new forms to clothe them in.

One may say indeed that this recognition of the supreme finality of theegofeeling among modern men seems a curious and not unrelated counterpart of the theory by which the modern physicist, in order to explain his physical world, divides it into atoms which atoms are themselves indivisible. We have here the perplexing problem which in the poemDe Profundis, partially read to you, was poetically called "the pain of this divisible, indivisible world." To explain the world, whether the moral or the physical world, we must suppose it divisible into atoms; to explain the atom, we must suppose that indivisible. Let us see then in what form this "pain of the divisible, indivisible world" with all its attendant pains of contradiction between fate and free will,—between the Infinite Personality, which shouldseem boundless, and the finite personality which nevertheless seems to bound it,—let us see, I say under what explicit forms this pain appears in thePrometheus Bound, for alas it was an old grief when Æschylus was a baby. Here, then, in the centre of the stage lies the gigantic figure of Prometheus, (let us fancy) stark, prostrate, proud, unmoving throughout the whole action. Two ministers of Jove, Might and Force, have him in charge and Hephæstus—the god more commonly known as Vulcan—stands by with chain, hammer and bolt. Might acquaints us at once with what is toward.

At length the utmost bound of earth we've reached,This Scythian soil, this wild untrodden waste.Hephæstus, now Jove's high behests demandThy care; to these steep, cliffy rocks bind downWith close-linked chains of during adamantThis daring wretch. For he the bright rayed fire,Mother of arts....Filched from the gods and gave to mortals. Here

Let his pride learn to bow to Jove supreme;And love men well but love them not too much.

Hephæstus proceeds to chain him, but with many protests, not only because Prometheus' act seems over-punished, but because he is Prometheus' kinsman.

Would that some other hand

(He cries)

"Had drawn the lotTo do this deed!"

To which Might replies

All things may be, but this:To dictate to the gods. There's one that's free,One only—Jove.

And Hephæstus sullenly acquiesces, as he beats away at his task,

"I know it, and am dumb."

—Amid similar talk—of protest from Vulcan and pitiless menace from Might—the great blacksmith proceeds to force an adamantine bolt through the breast of Prometheus, then to nail his feet to the rock, and so at last cries, in relief,

Let us away, He's fettered, limb and thew.

But Might must have his last pitiless speech.

"There lie,

he exults,—

And feed thy pride on this bare rock,Filching god's gifts for mortal men. What manShall free thee from these woes? Thou hast been calledIn vain the Provident:

(pro-vident, same as pro-metheus, he who looks ahead, who provides, the provident.)

had thy soul possessedThe virtue of thy name, thou had'st foreseenThese cunning toils, and had'st unwound thee from them.

Here all depart but Prometheus. Up to this time the Titan has maintained a proud silence. He now breaks into that large invocation which seems still to assault our physical ears across the twenty odd centuries.

O divine Æther, and swift-winged Winds,And Fountains of the rivers and multitudinousLaughter of ocean, and thou Earth,Born mother of us all, and thou bright roundOf the all-seeing Sun, you I invoke!Behold what ignominy of causeless wrongsI suffer from the gods, myself a god!

(This, by the way, is one of those passages which our elder poets seem to have regarded as somehow lying outside the pale of moral law—like umbrellas—and which they have therefore appropriated without a thought of blushing. Byron, inManfred, and Shelley, in hisPrometheus Unbound, have quite fairly translated parts of it.)

Enter now a chorus of Oceanides, and these continue throughout the play to perform the functions of exciting sympathy for the Protagonist, and of calling upon him for information when it becomes necessary that the audience should know this and that fact essential to the intelligibility of the action.

For example, after the Oceanides have alighted from their wind-borne car, and have condoled with the sufferer, Æschylus makes them the medium of drawing from Prometheus the recital of his wrongs, and thus of freshly placing that whole tremendous story before the minds of his audience.

Speak now,

say the chorus,

"And let us know the whole offenceJove charges thee withal."

And Prometheus relates

When first the gods their fatal strife began,And insurrection raged in heaven, some strivingTo cast old Kronos from his heavy throneThat Jove might reign, and others to crush i' the budHis swelling mastery—I wise counsel gaveTo the Titans, sons of primal Heaven and Earth;But gave in vain.Thus baffled in my plans, I deemed it best,As things then were, leagued with my mother Themis,To accept Jove's proffered friendship. By my counsels.From his primeval throne was Kronos hurledInto the pit Tartarean, dark, profound,With all his troop of friends.Soon as he sat on his ancestral throneHe called the gods together, and assignedTo each his fair allotment and his sphereOf sway; but, ah! for wretched man!To him no portion fell: Jove vowedTo blot his memory from the Earth, and mouldThe race anew. I only of the godsThwarted his will; and, but for my strong aid,Hades had whelmed, and hopeless ruin swampedAll men that breathe. Such were my crimes:

Soon as he sat on his ancestral throneHe called the gods together, and assignedTo each his fair allotment and his sphereOf sway; but, ah! for wretched man!To him no portion fell: Jove vowedTo blot his memory from the Earth, and mouldThe race anew. I only of the godsThwarted his will; and, but for my strong aid,Hades had whelmed, and hopeless ruin swampedAll men that breathe. Such were my crimes:

And here I lie, in cunning torment stretched,A spectacle inglorious to Jove.

Presently Ocean appears, and advises Prometheus to yield. Prometheus scornfully refuses, and Ocean, fearful of being found in bad company, prudently retires, whereupon, after a mournful hymn from the chorus, reciting the sympathy of all nations and things with Prometheus, he proceeds to relate in detail his ministry in behalf of mankind. The account which he gives of the primal condition of the human race is very instructive upon our present research, as embodying, or rather as unconsciously revealing, the complete unconsciousness of personality—of what we call personality—among Æschylus and his contemporaries.

Prometheus begins by calling the whole human race at that time a babe, and goes on to declare that

... Having eyes to see, they saw not,And hearing, heard not, but, like dreaming phantoms,A random life they led from year to year,All blindly floundering on. No craft they knew—to build—But in the dark earth burrowed....Numbers too I taught them ... and howTo fix their shifting thoughts by marshalled signs.

He brings the ox, the ass, and the horse into service, launches the first boat on the sea, teaches medicine, institutes divination, and finally

... I probed the earthTo yield its hidden wealth ...Iron, copper, silver, gold; ...And thus, with one short word to sum the tale,Prometheus taught all arts to mortal men.

CHORUS.

Do good to men, but do it with discretion.Why shouldst thou harm thyself? Good hope I nurseTo see thee soon from these harsh chains unbound,As free, as mighty, as great Jove himself.

PROMETHEUS.

This may not be; the destined curse of thingsFate must accomplish....Though art be strong, necessity is stronger.

CHORUS.

And who is lord of strong necessity?

PROMETHEUS.

The triform Fates and the sure-memoried Furies.

CHORUS.

And mighty Jove himself must yield to them?

PROMETHEUS.

No more than others Jove can 'scape his doom.

CHORUS.

There's some dread mystery in thy speechClose-veiled.

PROMETHEUS.

* * * * The truth thou'lt knowIn fitting season; now it lies concealedIn deepest darkness; for relenting JoveHimself 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, Æschylus 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 mortalsOwns 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 toprophesy the very eventful future which awaits her when her wanderings are over. In this prophetic account of her travels, Æschylus 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 partsThe continents, to the far flame-faced EastThou shalt proceed, the highway of the sun;Then cross the sounding ocean, till thou reachCisthene and the Gorgon plains, where dwellPhorcys' three daughters, maids with frosty eld,White as the swan, with one eye and one toothShared by the three; them Phœbus, beamy-brightBeholds not, nor the nightly moon. Near themTheir winged sisters dwell, the Gorgons dire,Man-hating monsters, snaky-locked, whom eyeOf mortal ne'er might look upon and live.* * * * One more sight remainsThat fills the eye with horror. * * *The sharp-beaked Griffins, hounds of Jove, avoid,Fell dogs that bark not; and the one-eyed hostOf Arimaspian horsemen with swift hoofsBeating the banks of golden-rolling Pluto.A distant land, a swarthy people nextReceives thee: near the fountains of the sunThey dwell by Ethiop's wave. This river traceUntil thy weary feet shall reach the passWhence from the Bybline heights the sacred NilePours his salubrious flood. The winding waveThence to triangled Egypt guides thee, whereA distant home awaits thee, fated motherOf an unstoried race.

In this strain Prometheus continues to foretell the adventures of Io until her son Epaphus, monarch ofEgypt, is born, who will be—through the fifty daughters celebrated inThe Suppliantsof Æschylus—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 thunderBellows, and the flaring lightningWreathes his fiery curls around meAnd the whirlwind rolls his dust,And the winds from rival regionsRush in elemental strife,And the sky is destroyed with the sea.Surely now the tyrant gathersAll his hoarded wrath to whelm me.Mighty Mother, worshipped Themis,Circling Æther that diffusestLight, 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 Æschylus, lays us under no necessity to involve ourselvesin 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 thesedovary 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 Müller, with his Sun-wanderings, to the dyspeptic theory of our vegetarian; our present concern is less with what Æschylus 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 couldnothave 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 Æschylus 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 Hephæstus, for example, or Vulcan. Vulcan may hammer away, immortal as he is, for a million æons 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 Æschylus 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, ofthis 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 leaveThy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;Bold lover, never, never canst thou kissThough 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 calledAetas 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 pownageAnd 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 sweteSleptyn thys blessyd folk withowte wallysOn 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 delicacyeCome in thys world, ne Nembroth desirousTo 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."

"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 pownageAnd 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 sweteSleptyn thys blessyd folk withowte wallysOn 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 delicacyeCome in thys world, ne Nembroth desirousTo 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'sRepublic, according to Jowett: "after all, a state of simplicity is a city of pigs."

But secondly, the cumbrous apparatus of power withwhich Æschylus presents us in this play is a conception of people not acquainted with that model of infinite compactness which every man finds in his ownego. 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 Hephæstus 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 modernegowhich, 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 anegoregards 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, thathe 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 Æschylus, 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 Æschylus and that of ourselves. The modern conception, I refer to is Keats' Ode on Melancholy; which, indeed, if one may say a wordobiter, 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.

ODE ON MELANCHOLY.

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twistWolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'dBy night-shade, ruby grape of Proserpine;Make not your rosary of yew-berries,Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth beYour mournful Psyche, nor the downy owlA partner in your sorrow's mysteries;For shade to shade will come too drowsily,And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.But when the melancholy fit shall fallSudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,And hides the green hill in an April shroud;Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,Or on the rainbow of the salt-sand wave,Or in the wealth of globed peonies;Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave,And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lipsBidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,Turning to poison while the bee-moth sips:Ay, in the very temple of DelightVeiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongueCan burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

But when the melancholy fit shall fallSudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,And hides the green hill in an April shroud;Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,Or on the rainbow of the salt-sand wave,Or in the wealth of globed peonies;Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave,And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lipsBidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,Turning to poison while the bee-moth sips:Ay, in the very temple of DelightVeiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongueCan burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

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 thePrometheusof Æschylus we have found three particulars, in which not only Æschylus, 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 Æschylus 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 meredilettanteentertainments where of our own free will we forgive the grossestviolations 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 thePrometheus Unbound.

We have seen that Æschylus 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 Æschylean 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 poemEach 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 waveFresh pearls to their enamel gave;And the bellowing of the savage seaGreeted their safe escape to me.I wiped away the weeds and foamI fetched my sea-born treasures home;But the poor, unsightly, noisome thingsHad left their beauty on the shoreWith 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 Æschylus 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 Æschylus, 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. Manyof you are aware of the scholastic belief that thePrometheus Boundof Æschylus 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—uponA 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 Æschylus and his contemporaries.

Prometheus exclaims:

"Monarch of gods and demons, and all spiritsBut one, who throng those bright and rolling worldsWhich thou and I alone of living thingsBehold with sleepless eyes!...Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,And moments aye divided by keen pangsTill they seemed years, torture and solitude,Scorn and despair,—these are mine empire,More glorious far than that which thou surveyestFrom 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 ofÆschylus. 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 spearsOf their moon-freezing crystals; the bright chainsEat with their burning cold into my bones.... The earthquake fiends are chargedTo wrench the rivets from my quivering woundsWhen the rocks split and close again behind;While from their wild abysses howling throngThe genii of the storm, urging the rageOf whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail."

"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 spearsOf their moon-freezing crystals; the bright chainsEat with their burning cold into my bones.

... The earthquake fiends are chargedTo wrench the rivets from my quivering woundsWhen the rocks split and close again behind;While from their wild abysses howling throngThe genii of the storm, urging the rageOf 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:

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