The Prometheus Unbound of Shelley

II.

THE MYTH OF THE DRAMA.

IN many a detail the meaning of the Prometheus Unbound eludes us; yet in great outlines it may be traced. Shelley takes as his starting-point the old story of Prometheus as found in the drama of Æschylos. Prometheus, the Titan, has stolen fire from heaven to benefit the race of man. Jupiter, in revenge, nails him high on a cliff of Caucasus, where he hangs through æons of pain. He possesses a secret, with which he refuses to part, which, if revealed, would ward off from Jupiter some unknown and terrible danger. These broad and simple facts Shelley adopts from the old Greek myth; then, with an audacious license born of the Revolution, he modifies, enlarges, innovates, to suit his own desires, till the glowing phantasmagoria of his poem bears slight resemblance to the grave and simple outlines of Æschylos.

When the drama opens, Prometheus, great protagonist of humanity, hangs on his mount of torture, high above the outspread world. But he is not alone. Sister-spirits, lone and Panthea, fair forms with drooping wings, sit watchful at his feet. They may be with him ; another presence, dearer than theirs, is denied. Asia, their great sister, the beloved of Prometheus, waits afar in sorrow ; and the bitterest element in the suffering of the Titan is the separation between himself and her. Prometheus, we say, is the protagonist of humanity. More specifically, and perhaps more accurately, he is the Mind of Man. Asia is the Spirit of divine Love, from whom man, in his exile, has become divided, yet without whom thought is powerless. To Shelley, this spirit of celestial love and beauty is supremely manifest through nature ; so Asia, in a loose but very real way, is identified in his thought, as Aphrodite was identified to the Greeks, with the creative and informing spirit of the natural world. Ione and Panthea, “messengers between the soul of man and its ideal,” represent the spirit of desire which we call Hope, and the power of spiritual insight and wisdom which, however Shelley would have shrunk from the term, we may best designate as Faith.

The first act may be entitled the Torture of Prometheus. The agony which Jupiter has power to inflict shall reach its bitter climax here. The drama opens with a great soliloquy of Prometheus, flung upward to the midnight sky : —

The mood of Prometheus, however, is not bitter. Disciplined by æons of silent pain, he has attained a new point of development. At the moment of his capture, he had hurled defiance at Jupiter, his foe, in a terrific curse. This curse he would now recall. Hatred has left his soul ; even the words of wrath and contempt he has forgotten. Let them be repeated, that he may revoke them, and remain free from the taint of revenge. But it is in vain that he calls on mountains, springs, and whirlwinds, — yes, on the Earth, his mother — to repeat the curse to him. They remember it well; repeat it they dare not. Nay, between the Earth and Prometheus there is alienation. He exclaims : —

Why scorns the spirit which informs ye, now
To commune with me ?

Man and nature are at strife ; or if not at strife, the old frank communion between them is disturbed. Prometheus cannot understand the “ inorganic voice ” of his mother.

He feels that baffling sense of a language half understood which haunts the human mind as, in the development of civilization, man travels daily farther from the east. At last, up from a strange underworld of shadows, the world of memory or imagination, the Phantasm of Jupiter himself arises, proud and calm, and pronounces the dread words. We have here, of course, the suggestion that the doom of evil is self-ordained; and the curse is simply the statement, or prophecy, of inexorable law.

This curse reads like the enlargement of the doom of Satan, as given in Paradise Lost.

“ That with reiterated crimes, he might
Heap on himself damnation.”

Yet, though the curse is only the expression of law, Prometheus would revoke it. The higher conception, that conception of forgiveness which interrupts all causal unity, has come to him. He recalls the curse.

The Earth, unable to accept the higher law, is filled with anguish, convinced that the withdrawal of the curse is the signal for the entire subjugation of Prometheus. Really, we have here, in the magnanimity of the Titan, the first step in the series of actions which occupies the drama, and by which the redemption of humanity is worked out. Jupiter, however, shares the misconception of the Earth. Cognizant, doubtless, on Olympus, of all that passes on the mount, and believing that Prometheus is at last ready to relent, he sends Mercury, the Spirit of Compromise, swiftly down, to extort the longed-for secret, and, if the Titan prove still rebellious, to inflict new pains. Mercury pleads, reasons, and at last tries to intimidate with obscure hints of a horrible torture to come ; but Prometheus repulses him with words of lofty scorn and invulnerable will. Forgiveness has implied no weakening of his firm integrity.

Then comes the great scene of the agony and temptation of Prometheus, — a scene which can be compared to the greatest scenes of torture in the whole literature of the world. There is nothing in Job, in Hamlet, in the Divine Comedy, more terrible than this. Throngs of Furies, awful forms of darkness, surge upward from the abyss. They press around Prometheus, a stifling, evil crowd.

They taunt him, they revile, they torture; nay, they enter his very being, and live through him, like animal life: —

thus giving the nearest suggestion of sin that the drama affords. Their shadowy and horrible shapelessness enhances the shuddering fear with which they inspire us. We feel them to be in truth emanations from the evil abysses of human nature, messengers of spiritual despair. The suffering which they indict is the deepest and subtlest that the soul can know. The first Furies, who enter the mind of Prometheus and whisper foul thoughts within, are supplemented by others who reveal to him the tragedy of human history. And the heart of the tragedy lies in the sneering suggestion, the true Mephistopheles thought, that the highest hopes and noblest impulses of man lead only to bitter sorrow and to degraded sin.

“ Most progress means most failure,” writes Cleon, the exponent of weary paganism, as he summarizes the conclusion of the ages in Browning’s clear-cut poem. Swinburne, in the bitter chorus of invective against the most high gods which marks the climax of Atalanta in Calydon, expresses the same wisdom of this world in passionate cadence : —

To apprehend the full force of the suffering of Prometheus, we must remember that all the progress of his “beloved race ” in knowledge and in hope is due to him ; that for his service to men he hangs “withering in destined pain.” This service the Furies now present as a curse, not a blessing, to mankind. To support their triumphant claim, they reveal to Prometheus two visions of the future, conceived by Shelley as the central moments of the world’s history, —the Crucifixion of Christ and the French Revolution. They show him Christianity “ become a curse ” to mankind through religious wars and persecutions ; they show him the bright hopes of the French Revolution quenched in bloodshed. During these visions, Ione and Panthea, who have so far supported the Titan by their songs and their presence, veil their faces. Faith indeed glances for one instant at the Christ figure, then hides her eyes in woe. Thus bereft of hope and faith, Prometheus meets his torture in awful solitude. Yet, though his soul is sorrowful unto death, it is not conquered. To the temptation of despair he does not yield, if despair mean the loss of inward loyalty to truth and right. It is striking that the last words of the Furies, the climax of torture for the pure and noble soul, are the mere enumeration of the commonplaces of daily life. Not the dramatic crises of the world’s history, but the trivial facts of constant experience, seem to Shelley the crowning embodiment of evil. But even here Prometheus conquers, through patience and unflinching courage.

The baffled Furies have vanished in rage; and now gather to console the Titan a troop of exquisite spirits. These spirits see the soul of goodness in things evil, as the Furies saw the soul of evil in things good. They are the Spirits of the Human Mind, bearing

that is, in the mind of man. They sing of Courage, which could not exist were no battles to be fought; of Self-sacrifice, which springs from pain alone ; of Wisdom and of Imagination, witnesses to a diviner day that is to be.

The gentle songs of these spirits soothe, although they cannot cheer, the exhausted soul of the sufferer. He sighs.

I would fain
Be what it is my destiny to be,
The saviour and the strength of suffering man ;
Or sink into the original gulf of things.
There is no agony and no solace left ;
Earth can console, Heaven can torment no more.

Thus the Titan hangs, weary, yet at peace. The morning slowly dawns ; and we leave him as his wistful thoughts turn towards Asia and towards love.

If the first act is the Torture of Prometheus, the second may be called the Journey of Asia. It is around her figure that action now centres; and the scenes in which the myth is unfolded are poetically the most wonderful in the Prometheus Unbound. The verse shines with spiritual meaning, profound yet elusive. It dazzles us like the sky at sunrise, yet, like the sky at sunrise, purges our eyes to clearer sight. At the beginning of the act Asia is alone. We find her waiting in an Indian vale, whose luxuriant beauty contrasts with the bleak ravine where Prometheus suffers. Yet Asia, too, is sorrowful, though her sorrow is passive. Separated from the human soul which gives her life, she languidly waits and dreams. She is to be aroused from her passivity, to learn that love’s mission is not only to endure, but to act, and through action to save the world. The season is spring, the moment sunrise. Asia expects Panthea, the Spirit of Intuition or of Faith which ever mediates between the soul of man and its ideal.

Panthea has strange dreams to narrate, — dreams of mystic meaning that summon to an action unknown. As she speaks, the soul of Love grows troubled. In the eyes of Faith she reads a double vision. First is the dream of fulfillment : Prometheus free, joyous, the consummation of her desire. Second comes the dream of progress ; and as she beholds it the impulses of her own brooding heart become clear to her.

Nature, which has been but the passive reflection of the beauty of love, becomes charged with spiritual significance. It stings with hunger for full light ; it murmurs a message, half understood, of a task that awaits, a reward to he won. We are here, in the drama of spiritual evolution, at the great point of the awakening of consciousness. Driven by an imperious inward stress, Asia must hence, she knows not whither. Unseen echoes summon her.

Asia seizes the hand of Panthea ; and together Love and Faith set forth on their long journey, — a journey which is to lead them into all depths of human experience, and which, in truth, though they know it not, is to be a pilgrimage of redemption. In the next scene we find the sister-spirits wandering through a dark forest, typifying, doubtless, the mysteries of human experience. Choruses of unseen spirits chant exquisite lyrics, which, perfect nature-poems, yet symbolize and suggest, the life of the senses, the emotions, the reason, and the will. Soon, —though how much of earthly time has been taken by this journey we may not tell, — Asia and Panthea stand on the summit of a lofty mountain. They can advance no farther by their own strength ; the next stage of their progress is to be a descent to the secret abysses of being, and this descent they can accomplish only when, abandoning self-guidance, they yield in meekness to spirit forces not their own. A troop of spirits gathers from out the shining mists that surge around the peak ; they seize the unresisting forms of Love and Faith, and bear them downward to the awful abode of Demogorgon, the unseen Fate who dwells in darkness.

This descent of Asia to the cave of Demogorgon recalls the descent of Faust to “ the Mothers,” the mysterious roots of things, in the second paid of Faust; it recalls yet more forcibly the fairest myth of the ancient world, where Psyche descends to the shades of Avernus.

Asia and Panthea now stand in the presence of an “ awful darkness ” which is yet “ a living spirit.” This shapeless, vital Darkness, which Shelley describes by negatives charged with imaginative awe, is Demogorgon, the most bewildering yet one of the most essential personages of the drama. He is Fate. He is also a great many other things, but it will suffice for the present to call him the unconscious Reason, which is the deepest innate governing principle of human life. Before this oracular Darkness Asia now stands, and questions. She asks a solution of the deepest problems of life, — asks, and in a sense is answered. In this scene, which is the dramatic centre of the poem, Shelley expounds to us his own thought concerning the problems of human destiny. Asia first asks Demogorgon to name the supreme ruler of the world ; and this question he half answers, half evades, in approved metaphysical fashion.

Asia then gives a long account of the upgrowth of society, of the services rendered to man by Prometheus, and of the relations between Prometheus and Jupiter. At the end she puts the crucial, the central question, — the question which, from the beginning of human time, has lain heavy on the heart of Love, — Is the supreme ruler of the world evil or good ? What is the nature, what the source, of evil ? The answer of Demogorgon is profoundly significant.

Thus the answer of Reason to the central problem of human existence does but corroborate the yearning intuition of the heart. Love supreme, love eternal, triumphant over fate, time, occasion, chance, and change, — this is the deepest word the human reason deigns to speak. Shelley’s message here is the message of all true poets. “ L’Amor, che muove il sole e l’altre stelle ” is ever the burden of their song. Tennyson’s In Memoriam is the representative poem of the middle of the century as Prometheus Unbound of its earlier years. Utterly different as are the two poems in structure and spirit, their truth is the same; immortal Love is sung by both alike; love discerned immortal by the first yearning of the eager heart, proved immortal only by the dark and lonely journey through soul-experience.

cries Tennyson ; and the thought is the thought of Shelley, strengthened and defined in the more modern poet by centring the immortal Love in a personality rather than in an abstraction. If Shelley expressed the highest faith of the first of the century, and Tennyson of its central years, Robert Browning is the accepted leader of our thought and faith to-day. We find in him the same note, more triumphant, carried forward, as Shelley could not carry it, save by one swift hint, into eternity.

The speculative questions of Asia are answered. There remains the question of fact. She seeks to know the fate of Prometheus and herself, and demands the hour of redemption. The answer comes in deeds, not words. Swiftly appears a vision of the cars of the Hours. One waits for Demogorgon, one for Asia. The awful form of Dcmogorgon mounts the car of darkness, and is borne away, while Asia and Panthea, transported to the shining chariot, are whirled more swiftly than the lightning to a mystic mount. Then comes the consummation of the drama. Asia is transfigured before us. Her being shines with a strange radiance so intense that Panthea trembles before it, — so intense that it hides her from view. A voice, the voice of Prometheus, is heard chanting to her a worshipful lyric, the highest expression alike of Shelley’s genius and of his faith.

With Asia’s responsive song, of almost equal beauty and of profound spiritual significance, the act concludes. This song is too long to be given here. In it, says William Rossetti, “the soul, transported into idealism by melody, muses upon the indefinable possibilities of existence, prenatal and preter-lethal, — the world of spirit before birth and after death.”

The apotheosis of Love is the climax of the spiritual action of the drama. In the third act we witness the fall of Jupiter and the liberation of Prometheus. Jupiter has just married Thetis. The child of this union — here is the secret which Prometheus has so persistently withheld — is to destroy his father. Strange child ! for in truth he is no other than an incarnation of Demogorgon. In the car of darkness he ascends to the resplendent throne of the world’s ruler and pronounces doom. Scorn avails nothing: the weapons of the gods are futile ; futile, thunderbolts and prayers. The curse is fulfilled, and, in a passage of superb condensation and vitality, Jupiter confesses his defeat, while, from high heaven, he sinks into the abyss.

Hercules releases Prometheus, who, reunited to Asia, enters upon an existence of limitless freedom and perfect love. The Spirit of the Hour speeds, proclaiming redemption, over land and sea ; and, with a long passage describing the joyful effects of his tidings, the act concludes.

The fourth act was an afterthought, but one which we could ill afford to miss. It is a triumphant chorus of rejoicing. All powers of the earth and air, of the natural and the spiritual world, unite in a wondrous pæan that for depth and variety of music, for beauty of imagery, for the expression of rapturous gladness, finds no parallel in English verse. It is to music rather than to literature that we must look for the analogues of such poetry as this.

Even in this brief outline the significance of the myth of the Prometheus Unbound must have become fairly clear. It is evident that the drama has for its theme the redemption of humanity, and that the theme is conceived under the influence of the new democratic faith. Let us now glance a little more closely at some of the characters, and at the means by which redemption is accomplished.

Prometheus and Asia, Panthea and lone, are probably clear enough. Jupiter, the evil power, it is, however, easy to misconceive. We must beware of considering him the abstract power of moral evil. To Shelley, his significance is perhaps mainly political. A few lines near the conclusion of the third act give the clue to him : —

As we have seen, he derives his power from Prometheus. He thus stands for all those institutions, civil or religious, which were once the true expression of human will, but which, as the centuries pass, become effete though powerful forms, with an innate tendency to repress progress. Mr. Rossetti considers that Jupiter represents the anthropomorphic god, a delusion of the human mind ; but surely he is much more than this. “ Thrones, altars, judgment-seats, and prisons,” — these, in one grand composite, including as they do all forms by which man has projected into society the authority of law, unite in the idea of Jupiter. To Shelley, as we have seen, the soul of man is essentially good and pure; evil, an accident of the outer life, inheres exclusively in that outward authority which checks the free play of impulse. The evil Jupiter thus conceived is a shadowy creature enough. We feel that he loses all but a nominal existence when Prometheus, in forgiving him, ceases to respect, him. He pronounces his own doom, and by his Own weight he falls; never possessing our imagination except in the instant of his destruction. In the marriage of Jupiter with Thetis, Shelley seems to suggest the overweening arrogance in which a political tyranny invests itself with the pomp of false glory, and which always precedes its overthrow. The form of Demogorgon, assumed by the child of this fateful union, is the most difficult in the whole drama to apprehend ; but we can see one or two simple ideas for which he stands. In his aspect as child of Jupiter and Thetis, Demogorgon undoubtedly means revolution, — that revolution which always follows the marriage of unrighteous power to overweening display. Historically, Todhunter ingeniously suggests that Demogorgon stands for the critical and destructive thought of the eighteenth century, which, nurtured by an artificial civilization, became the force by which that civilization was overthrown. As to the more general conception of Demogorgon, we can neither define nor understand it, because Shelley doubtless meant him to represent that background of inscrutable mystery in existence which is at once the source and negation of all our knowledge. He has been compared to the Hegelian Absolute, and any one who enjoys the suggestion may get what he can out of it. The most useful way to think of him is as the Principle of Reason ; reason, not indeed omniscient, but the best instrument man possesses for the approach to absolute truth. Lying deep in the unconscious life of humanity, this Reason is passionless and passive ; yet now and again it will be roused, it will arise, and, appearing in time under the guise of some relentless phase of thought, will sweep down the old, and sink once more into silence.

We are ready now to discuss the process by which, in the myth of the young Shelley, redemption is worked out. The preparation is twofold : the purification of the mind of man from all taint of revenge ; the awakening of the heart of man to responsibility and action. The act of redemption also has a twofold aspect, negative and positive ; the negative is embodied in Demogorgon, the positive in Asia; and the whole action finds dynamic power in the scene in the cave of Demogorgon. The overweening arrogance of Jupiter is indeed the obvious cause of his overthrow ; but there is a more potent cause, hidden in the secret mysteries of being. For, in the abode of darkness, Asia and Demogorgon have met. Love has questioned ancient Wisdom ; and it is only after this interview that the “ mighty shadow ” floats upward from his throne to the throne of Jupiter. Surely, the poet means to image to us the profound truth, that it is only through contact with emotion that abstract thought can be roused to action, and can appear in the sphere of practical life, a vital force. We have here a clear suggestion of that revolutionary process by which the frigid and inert reasoning of Voltaire and his kin, becoming charged with passion, overthrew the former world.

Thus the self - destruction of evil is accomplished, and on the negative side the process is complete ; but in the evolution of the myth there is a positive aspect of far greater beauty. Not only by the overthrow of evil, but by the active force of good, is the end attained. Through Asia, spirit of celestial love, shall redemption be achieved, — Asia, the Light of Life, highest embodiment in Shelley’s poetry of that ideal towards which his worship ever ascends. If Reason must be charged with passion before it can prevail, so Love, on the other hand, must become instinct with wisdom ere it can be made manifest in that glory which shall save the world. The interview in the awful darkness is a crisis to Asia as well as to Demogorgon, even though wisdom can but reiterate the primal instinct of love. After this interview Love is transfigured. Its rosy warmth pervades the whole creation, and its force is revealed triumphantly supreme. This is the crowning act through which, in the mystery of creation, the redemption of Prometheus is achieved.

Thus, by a double process, destructive and constructive, by revolution and by love, is set free the human soul. At this point the Prometheus Unbound ceases to be great. When the drama turns from hope, endurance, endeavor, to picture fulfillment, it drops into bathos. Sentimental and empty, guilty of that worst of æsthetic sins, prettiness, is Shelley’s description of the ideal state. After their titanic throes, their radiant achievement, Prometheus and Asia are united ; and we look for some hint of progressive and inconceivable rapture to form the conclusion of the drama. No such hint is given. They retire to a cave; there, after the fashion of an imitation pastoral, they spend their lazy days in the enjoyment of sentiment and art. For a regenerate humanity Shelley has no message. His ideal is radically unprogressive, — the return to a golden age of insipid innocence rather than the advance into new regions of spiritual and material conquest.

is his humanity of the future : and the thought and the poetry in which the coming life is described are equally flat.

In part, this descent into bathos is of course inevitable. Descriptions of the millennium are always futile. Even the Apocalypse deals only with reticent and reverent symbol, and all uninspired Utopias, from Plato’s Republic to News from Nowhere, send us back with renewed zest to the miseries of the present. Yet the peculiar weakness of Shelley’s ideal is especially interesting, because it marks the exact limits of his age. The revolutionary conception had two defects : it ignored Law and it ignored God. The Prometheus Unbound is weak, first, because it has no hint of the modern scientific conception of evolution ; second, because of the vagueness of its religious ideals. To revolutionary thought, salvation was to be achieved by a sudden overthrow of tyrants rather than by a progressive development of better out of worse. The thought of law is abhorrent to Shelley, and the invertebrate society described in the third act of the Prometheus Unbound is the natural result of a state of pure anarchy. Anarchy as an ideal ought to have been made impossible for us to-day by the teachings of modern science. There is, moreover, a spiritual as well as a scientific lack in the drama. The interpretation of evil is hopelessly superficial ; it ignores not only the scientific aspect of evil as arrested development, but also the far deeper and truer aspect of evil as sin. To represent outward authority as the only source that hampers the free purity of man is simply to be false to fact. The absence in the drama of any outlook towards immortality, or any suggestion of the divine Fatherhood, is the final source of its weakness. Shut off from any hope of endless growth towards infinite perfection in the hereafter, shut in upon himself with no definite ideal towards which he can strive and no spiritual strength on which he can rely, it is small wonder that man, as depicted by Shelley, is a creature of no personality, —scarcely higher, except for his æsthetic aspects, than an amiable brute.

The crudity of the Prometheus Unbound thus belongs to the Revolution; its strength is largely, though not entirely, from the same source. When we look at the poem as a whole, the surface inconsistencies, the disappointing conclusion, vanish from our thought, and leave a work of resplendent insight. The weakness is of the intellect; the strength is of the spirit. Far above its crude convictions soared the clear faith of the new democratic ideal. This faith is eternal. It has a profound love for humanity, a sympathy for all the woes of a suffering world. Such love, such sympathy, burn on every page of the Prometheus Unbound. It is full of a passion for freedom. Such passion irradiates the drama. Above all, it breathes the spirit of a deathless hope : and the serene assurance that evil shall be conquered by the might of love is the soul of Shelley’s poem. Through every line sounds a hope that can neither falter nor repent, supreme in torture, triumphant over despair. The verse is suffused with the light of it, and gleams with the radiance of dawn. The Prometheus Unbound is a poem of the sunrise.

Attainment in the drama there is none ; of rest it has no message. It is a cloudcapped morning vision, with something of the elusiveness, the swift transitions, the shining mystery, of the cloud. As such we must receive it. The age was one of promise, not of achievement, and we wrong its greatest poem when we search it for something which the age could not bestow. The Prometheus Unbound is the drama of hope.

It remains in a final paper to treat of this drama as a work of art.

Vida D. Scudder.