A STUDY SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND BY WILLIAM, MICHAEL ROSSETTI. Eonbon: PRINTED FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION, MDCCCLXXXVI. A STUDY OF SHELLEY'S "PROMETHEUS UNBOUND." Of this Book Twenty-five Copies only have been printed. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, FROM THE ORIGINAL PICTURE BY CLINT SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, A STUDY OF ITS MEANING AND PERSONAGES. BY WILLIAM M. ROSSETTI. zmxcm? Hontoon : PRINTED FOR PRIVATE DISTRIBUTION. 1886. SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UHBOUHD. A STUDY OF ITS MEANING AND PERSONAGES. BY WILLIAM M. ROSSETTI. Being a Lecture delivered to the Shelley Society on Jth December, 1886. Ladies and Gentlemen, — I have undertaken to deliver to the members of the Shelley Society a lecture constituting a study of our poet's most colossal performance, the Prometheus Unbound. This is, I am fully aware, a task which might well appall the boldest of Shelleyites : nor do I undertake it with a light heart, or with any idea of rendering adequate justice to it from any point of view — still less from all the points of view which might properly be taken. It would be possible to consider the Prometheus Unbound — 1, in its essential meaning or main outline and purport ; 2, as a poem and work of art ; and 3, in detail, or the individual significance and value of its successive passages. I can only expect, in the short space at my disposal, to treat the drama in the first of these relations — z.£,, in its essential meaning or main outline and purport ; in other words, I will explain to you what I regard as having been Shelley's intention in the substance and structure of his masterpiece, the Prometheus Unbound. My interpretation may be right, or it may be wrong : it will certainly fall very far short of being final or exhaustive. It is at any rate the out- come of repeated readings and prolonged consideration. I might add that this is by no means the first time that I have put into writing, or into print, my view of the meaning 8 SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. of the poem ; but it is the first time that I have done so with any moderate degree of fullness or precision, and with the opportunity of quoting from the poem itself those passages upon which the interpretation has to rely for its stability — what the French call the pieces justificatives. Without further preface, I will now come to close quarters with Prometheus Unbound ; and, asking you to bear in mind what I have just said — that I deal only with its essential meaning or main outline and purport — I shall analyse this meaning under five principal heads — i,What is the Myth, or (as we might call it) the vertebrated skele- ton, of the Prometheus Unbound ; 2, Who is Prometheus ; 3, Who is Asia ; 4, Who is Jupiter ; 5, Who is Demogorgon. And 1, as to the Myth. In debating the Myth of Prometheus Unbound, I shall leave entirely on one side the question as to what is the primary Greek myth about Prometheus the son of Iapetus. He must take care of himself: and ^Eschylus, or any other poet or promulgator of that myth, must take care of him- self. With Shelley alone, and his creation the Prometheus Unbound, can I now be concerned. He voluntarily and determinately parted company with ^schylus, saying in his preface that he was "averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind." The general myth of Prometheus Unbound is set forth very definitely in a leading speech of Asia in Act 2. I will read it in extenso, and afterwards consider in detail its terms and bearing. " There was the Heaven and Earth at first, And Light and Love ; then Saturn, from whose throne Time fell, an envious shadow. Such the state Of the earth's primal spirits beneath his sway- As the calm joy of flowers and living leaves Before the wind or sun has withered them, And semivital worms. But he refused The birthright of their being, knowledge, power, The skill which wields the elements, the thought Which pierces this dim universe like light, Self-empire, and the majesty of love ; For thirst of which they fainted. Then Prometheus Gave wisdom, which is strength, to Jupiter, And, with this law alone ' Let man be free,' Clothed him with the dominion of wide Heaven. SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, To know nor faith nor love nor law, to be Omnipotent but friendless, is to reign. And Jove now reigned ; for on the race of Man First famine, and then toil, and then disease, Strife, wounds, and ghastly death unseen before, Fell ; and the unseasonable seasons drove, "With alternating shafts of frost and fire, Their shelterless pale tribes to mountain-caves : And in their desert hearts fierce wants he sent, And mad disquietudes, and' shadows idle Of unreal good, which levied mutual war, So ruining the lair wherein they raged. Prometheus saw, and waked the legioned hopes Which sleep within folded elysian flowers, Nepenthe, moly, amaranth, fadeless blooms, That they might hide with thin and rainbow wings The shape of Death ; and Love he sent to bind The disunited tendrils of that vine "Which bears the wine of life, the human heart ; And he tamed fire, — which, like some beast of prey Most terrible but lovely, played beneath The frown of man, and tortured to his will Iron and gold, the slaves and signs of Power, And gems and poisons, and all subtlest forms Hidden beneath the mountains and the waves. He gave Man speech, and speech created thought, "Which is the measure of the universe ; And science struck the thrones of earth and heaven, "Which shook but fell not ; and the harmonious mind Poured itself forth in all-prophetic song ; And music lifted up the listening spirit, Until it walked, exempt from mortal care, Godlike, o'er the clear billows of sweet sound ; And human hands first mimicked, and then mocked With moulded limbs more lovely than its own, The human form, till marble grew divine, And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see Reflected in their race, behold, and perish. He told the hidden power of herbs and springs, And Disease drank and slept. Death grew like sleep. He taught the implicated orbits woven Of the wide-wandering Stars ; and how the Sun Changes his lair, and by what secret spell The pale Moon is transformed when her broad eye Gazes not on the interlunar sea. He taught to rule, as life directs the limbs, The tempest-winged chariots of the ocean And the Celt knew the Indian. Cities then Were built, and through their snow-like columns flowed The warm winds, and the azure ether shone, And the blue sea and shadowy hills were seen. Such, the alleviations of his state, Prometheus gave to man : for which he hangs, Withering in destined pain. But who rains down Evil, the immedicable plague, which, while Man looks on his creation like a God, A 2 io SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. And sees that it is glorious, drives him on, — The wreck of his own will, the scorn of Earth, The outcast, the abandoned, the a'one? Not Jove. While yet his frown shook heaven, ay when His adversary from adamantine chains Cursed him, he trembled like a slave. Declare Who is his master ? Is he too a slave ? " This speech is fertile of meaning and suggestion. We find that according to Asia (or, let us say, according to Shelley) the primal powers of the World were four — Heaven, Earth, Light, and Love. This was the world ; which, so far as Asia's speech is concerned, is postulated as self-existent, — of a creative power no word is breathed by her : but it is true that Demogorgon, with whom she is in colloquy, had already said that the world and its contents were made by God. Then came Saturn, the author of Time. Under him human life was agreeable sensation without sentiment : life became (as we might express it) individuated, but barely self-conscious ; Saturn refused to men the birthright of their being — knowledge, power, and those other prerogatives named by Asia. The Saturnian reign was interrupted by Prometheus. "Then Prometheus Gave wisdom, which is strength, to Jupiter, And, with this law alone ' Let man be free,' Clothed him with the dominion of wide Heaven." I regard these few words as being supremely important to the correct understanding of Prometheus Unbound: but, as we are for the present only occupied with the myth of the poem, I shall not analyse them here, but leave them for consideration when we discuss Prometheus and Jupiter. The rule of Jupiter was perfidious and cruel : every kind of material and moral evil resulted from it to the race of man. Prometheus again came to the rescue. "He gave Man speech, and speech created thought, Which is the measure of the universe." For this, and for his other boons to mankind, was he doomed by Jupiter to incessant torture. Asia then proceeds (as we have seen) to ask, " Who is the Author or Lord of Evil ? " Not Jove, as she says ; for he trembled even before his own victim Prometheus. 11 Who is his master ? Is he too a slave ? " SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. n Demogorgon replies — 1 • All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil : Thou know'st if Jupiter be such or no." This certainly means, he is a slave. Asia next recurs to what Demogorgon had said in the earlier part of the colloquy, that God had made the world, with all that it contains of thought and sentiment : she asks, " Whom call'dst thou God ? " — and Demogorgon re- plies (note it well) — " I spoke but as ye speak, For Jove is the supreme of living things. " In other words — There is no creative God, apart from the Universe. He adds that the deep truth is imageless — it cannot be made palpable in words ; and he intimates that, save eternal Love, all things are subject to Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change. Shelley's own ideas in theology are probably expressed in these terms with a near approach to accuracy. Prometheus, chained by Jupiter to Caucasus in torment, endures " three-thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours." This is a remarkable expression : three-thousand years is but a brief estimate even of the historical period of human development ; and, as the unbinding of Prometheus ensues immediately after his speaking of the three-thousand years, it would appear that Shelley contemplated a very early awakening and emancipation of the race. But of course we must not lay, upon such a point as this, any stress beyond what it may naturally have been intended to bear. At the end of the three-thousand years Prometheus has ceased to disdain or hate Jupiter : he pities him. He wishes no living thing to suffer pain. He re-hears, from the phantom lips of a phantom Jupiter summoned for the purpose, the curse which he had of old pronounced against the tyrant god, and he revokes it. He is then re-tormented by the Furies with visions chiefly intimating that evil flows out of good — as out of the mission of Jesus Christ and the French Revolution. The agonizing night closes, a new dawn appears, and Panthea, one of the sister Ocean-nymphs who attend on Prometheus, rejoins in an Indian vale his bride and her sister Asia. Asia and Panthea are led by mysterious spirit-songs to 12 SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. the cave of Demogorgon ; with the message that meekness alone can unloose to life the doom from under the throne of the Eternal. This meekness in Asia corresponds to the forgiving mood of mind, the universal charity, which Pro- metheus has just evinced. Then ensues the colloquy between Asia and Demogorgon, of which we have been reading a part. Asia finally asks " When will the destined Hour arrive " for the release of Prometheus ? "Behold ! " is the reply of Demogorgon. At that very moment the Hour arrives : Demogorgon mounts the car which conveys the Hour, and they disappear into space, the Spirit of the Hour having announced that he comes for the final dethronement of Jupiter. That which immediately follows seems to have more relation to Greek mythology than to the Shelleian myth of Prometheus Unbound: at any rate, its connexion with the former up to a certain point is clear, while its signifi- cance for the purposes of the latter is ambiguous. Jupiter, among the gods of Heaven or Olympus, is celebrating his nuptials with the sea-goddess Thetis — " Thetis, bright image of Eternity." He forecasts that the result of their nuptials will be that he will himself become omnipotent, subduing his last opponent or rebel, the soul of man. He says (and this I cannot attempt to present with more clearness and condensation than Shelley gives it) — 11 Even now have I begotten a strange wonder — That fatal Child, the terror of the earth, Who waits but till the destined Hour arrive (Bearing from Demogorgon's vacant throne The dreadful might of ever-living limbs Which clothed that awful spirit unbeheld) To re-descend and trample out the spark." He adds (putting the same thing in slightly different words) that the two mighty spirits, himself and Thetis, have generated another spirit mightier than either, await- ing even now its incarnation from Demogorgon's throne. Thus far Jupiter's vision has served him : but his prevision has deceived him wofully. Demogorgon at this moment arrives. He pronounces the words, "lam thy child, as thou wert Saturn's child Mightier than thou " — and summons Jupiter to descend with him into The abyss SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND: 13 — " We must dwell together Henceforth in darkness/' For one instant Jupiter attempts to resist and destroy his antagonist. At the next moment, he has nothing for it but abject and unavailing prayers, and he sinks " Dizzily down, ever for ever down." Hercules now unbinds Prometheus from his Caucasian rock, and the Titan is reunited with Asia, who, along with Panthea, has arrived in the car of another Spirit of the Hour. Prometheus speaks to lone of a shell which had been given by Proteus as a nuptial-boon to Asia, breathing within it a voice to be accomplished : lone had, in the day of calamity, hidden it beneath a rock. He asks lone to deliver this shell to the Spirit of the Hour, with " the dovelike eyes of Hope ;" the Spirit is to traverse the world blowing the shell, for now at length shall its voice be accomplished. Mother Earth, who assumes a personal presence as she had done in the first scene of the drama, says that henceforth all her animal and vegetable progeny shall take sweet nutriment. Death shall be but like a mother resuming final possession of her child : but she cannot define to the questioning Asia what Death actually is — only thus — " Death is the veil which those who live call life — They sleep, and it is lifted." Then comes " a Spirit in the likeness of a winged child." This is " the Spirit of the Earth " : not Earth herself the general mother, but " the delicate spirit that guides the earth through heaven." After Prometheus, Asia, and their company, have arrived at the cavern which is to be their dwelling-place, this Spirit describes what he has seen as consequent upon the sounding of the shell by the Spirit of the Hour : an all-pervasive amelioration in Man and Nature. The Spirit of the Hour next returns, and relates the result of his mission. The change which has just been wrought was not abruptly startling, but thrones were kingless, women elevated in sentiment, "all things had put their evil nature off"; kingfishers, for instance (as just previously stated by the Spirit of the Earth), having become vegetarians. The temples of Jupiter, in his various forms or attributes, are now mouldering. • Man Is not 'passionless, he is still man ; but he is free from 14 SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. guilt or pain, and can rule, though not evade, "chance and death and mutability." In the last act of the stupendous drama the Spectres of the dead Hours bear Time to his tomb in Eternity, and a new series of Hours, which had for ages been suppressed, take their places. The Spirits of the Mind, which had consoled Prometheus in his hour of agony in the first Act after the torturing of the Furies, now reappear, and chant their song of deliverance and triumph. Next, lone and Panthea wit- ness a grand and glorious vision : the cars of the Moon- spirit and of the Earth-spirit. The Moon has become vitalized by the influence of the regenerated Earth, and the two Spirits address one another in terms of human love. Man, says the Spirit of the Earth, has now become a sea reflecting love ; while labour, pain, and grief, are gentle as tame beasts. It may be worth while to consider for a moment what appears to have been Shelley's idea in relation to this child-like Spirit of the Earth, who (as we have already seen) appears along with the ancient Mother Earth, parent of Titans and of men, and must therefore symbolize something different from her. In the scene of his first appearance, he addresses Asia as "Mother, dearest Mother;" an expression which may become clearer to us after we shall have endeavoured to define the personality of Asia herself. He was a child when the dismal severance of Asia and Prometheus came to pass, and remains as yet a child now that they are re-united in rapture. Perhaps we should see in this Spirit an emblem of the childhood of the world in its golden prime before Prometheus had been chained ; a child now resuming his career of development, and preparing for his larger and unbounded destinies. From another point of view, as he is "the delicate spirit that guides the earth through heaven," we might regard him as the perpetual rejuvenescence of the earth, renewed from day to day, from season to season, from year to year, and from aeon to seon — never wearied, never ageing, a perpetual child among the stars of the firmament. From a passage in the note written by Mrs. Shelley to the drama, it would appear that Shelley advisedly intended, in this final act of it, .to give a new and diverse symbol of the Earth. She says, " In the fourth Act the poet: gives further scope to SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. 15 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." We now come to the last utterance, the last passage, of Prometheus Unbound. Demogorgon rises. He addresses Daemons and Gods, living beyond heaven's constellated wildernesses; he addresses the Dead, who may (the poet leaves the point undetermined) be of the nature of the universe, or may change and pass away. This is the day which, at the spell of the Earthborn, of the Titan Prome^ theus, yawns for Heaven's despotism. Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance (the qualities which have sus- tained Prometheus through his agelong agonies), are the seals to bar the pit over Destruction's strength. To suffer, to forgive, to defy, to love, to hope, neither to change nor falter nor repent — this is alone life, joy, empire, and victory. So, with trumpet-tone as of a world emancipated through the sum of its human greatness, terminates the Prometheus Unbound of Shelley. The general moral conceptions upon which this drama proceeds are, I think, sufficiently self-evident : the observa- tions which I shall proceed to make upon the personality of Prometheus, and of the other agents in the drama, will aim to make that point all the more perspicuous. I will therefore at this stage limit myself to quoting a few words from Mrs. Shelley's note to Prometheus Unbound: — "The prominent feature," she says, " 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. 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." No doubt Mrs. Shelley speaks correctly here. The idea which Shelley thus symbolizes in Prometheus Unbound is the very same which 16 SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. animates Queen Mab, and which is formulated in Julian and Maddalo, — not to speak of other poems, especially The Revolt of Islam, There is one point in Shelley's theory of the perfecti- bility of man — of man as he shall exist after the unbind- ing of Prometheus — which I should like to illustrate out of one of his notes to Queen Mab. It will have been observed that Shelley does not — even in this symbolic or allegorical method of exposition — contemplate that man will become deathless ; on the contrary, he says expressly that man will remain subject to death, and what death is he declines to attempt defining with any precision. But there is a certain sense in which human life might be extended or protracted ad infinitum ; the note to Queen Mab propounds this. It runs thus : — "Time is our consciousness of the succession of ideas in our mind. Vivid sensation of either pain or pleasure makes the time seem long, as the common phrase is, because it renders us more acutely conscious of our ideas. If a mind be conscious of a hundred ideas during one minute by the clock, and of two hundred during another, the latter of these spaces would actually occupy so much greater extent in the mind as two exceed one in quantity. If therefore the human mind, by any future improvement of its sensibility, should become con- scious of an infinite number of ideas in a minute, that minute would be eternity. I do not hence infer that the actual space between the birth and death of a man will ever be prolonged ; but that his sensibility is perfectible, and that the number of ideas which his mind is capable of receiving is indefinite. Thus the life of a man of virtue and talent who should die in his thirtieth year is, with regard to his own feelings, longer than that of a miserable priest-ridden slave who dreams out a century of dullness." How significant has become to us that phrase about the " man of virtue and talent who should die in his thirtieth year ! " It is the very age at which Shelley himself died. I have now done with the myth of Prometheus Unbound, and I proceed to my second stage — the inquiry, " Who is Prometheus ? " This inquiry I shall at once answer by saying that Prometheus is the Mind of Man. I wish to emphasize this point, for I think the amplitude and precision of meaning in this great ideal drama are only elicited when we have realized the definition to ourselves. Prometheus is not in a vague general sense man, collective humankind ; he is the mind of man — human mind— the intellect of the race — SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. 17 that faculty whereby man is man, not brute. The unbind- ing of Prometheus is the unbinding of the Human Mind ; the deliverance wrought to mankind by the unbinding of Prometheus is the deliverance wrought to man by the unbinding of his mind. This, I venture to say, is a distinction not without a difference ; and Mrs. Shelley was but half-way towards the truth when she wrote that her husband figured " Saturn as the good principle, Jupiter the usurping evil one, and Prometheus as the regenerator." Another of her definitions comes much nearer the mark, but still does not exactly hit it : " Prome- theus," she says, " is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the truest and the purest motives to the best and noblest ends." Let me next endeavour to prove, out of Shelley's own mouth, that he wished us to identify Prometheus with the Mind of Man. Shelley's Prometheus is a Titan, a son of Mother Earth. Thus Shelley assumes the Mind of Man as earth-born. In the first Scene, Prometheus says to Earth, "Mother, thy sons and thou Scorn him without whose all-enduring will Beneath the fierce omnipotence of Jove Both they and thou had vanished : " a phrase quite appropriate to the mind, as the sustaining and preserving power of the human race. As we have seen, Prometheus has in this first scene attained to the passion of universal benevolence : he wishes well to all things, evil to none — not now even to Jupiter. In the curse which he had of old hurled against Jupiter, and which he now gets a phantom to recite, are the words, 14 O'er all things but thyself I gave thee power, And my own will : " a deeply significant phrase, partly as indicating the unvanquishable power of will in the Human Mind, and partly as showing that the Mind itself is that which has allotted or ascribed power to the Vicissitude of the World : but this will be more fully developed when we come to speak of Jupiter. " I gave all he has " is a later phrase still pointing in the same direction. One of the Furies 18 SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. says to Prometheus, " Dost thou boast the clear know- ledge thou waken'dst for man ? " and whence does the knowledge of man proceed save from his mind ? Similarly Hercules, in unbinding Prometheus, addresses him as the form animated by "wisdom, courage, and long-suffering love" — all of them attributes of the mind. The Soul of Love is the hope and prophecy which begins and ends in Prometheus. We must, however, recur to that great speech addressed by Asia to Demogorgon. In this speech Prometheus is introduced immediately after Asia has spoken of the state of mankind under the sway of Saturn ; how men were destitute of knowledge, power, the thought which pierces the universe, and other high endowments of their nature. The very first thing which we hear from Asia about Prometheus is this, "Then Prometheus Gave wisdom, which is strength, to Jupiter, And, with this law alone ' Let man be free,' Clothed him with the dominion of wide Heaven." Profoundly significant words, to which we are bound to attach a positive meaning. I read them thus. When men had reached this half-development of their faculties, and pined eagerly for more, the Mind of Man invested Jupiter with wisdom, or regarded him as the embodiment and source of wisdom, and ascribed to him the dominion of heaven ; in other words, the Mind of Man created a God after its own image. But Jupiter persecuted the race of man with divers plagues unknown before. Asia proceeds : — " Promethus saw, and waked the legioned hopes Which sleep within folded elysian flowers " — and so on : we have already perused the passage. Again let us interpret. The Mind of Man raised up the hopes of an immortal destiny ; it developed mutual love in humankind ; it used fire for all useful services. It gave man speech, and speech created thought ; poetry, music, sculpture, medicine, astronomy, navigation, architecture : — " Such, the alleviations of his state, Prometheus gave to man : for which he hangs Withering in destined pain." If once we miss out the word Prometheus, and sub- stitute the term " the Human Mind," we can readily SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. 19 understand the assertion that it is the Human Mind which has conferred all these benefits upon the race of man. But the Mind of Man is oppressed and tormented by the very God of its own installation, or (to put it in a merely prosaic phrase) by its own false and superstitious conceptions in theology ; • and in its own essence it is tainted with the passions of rage, hatred, and revenge. To these passions Prometheus had given utterance in his curse of old agai-nst Jupiter. It is only at the opening of our ideal drama, after his " three-thousand years of sleep- unsheltered hours," that Prometheus the Human Mind utterly rejects these peccant elements — he says at last that he is changed so that aught evil wish is dead within, and he has no memory of what is hate — u It doth repent me : words are quick and vain : Grief for a while is blind, and so was mine : I wish no living thing to suffer pain." As we have already seen, this final superiority of the mind over its darker passions is the beginning of the downfall of Jupiter, and of the unbinding of Prometheus. In the third Act of the drama we find Prometheus unbound, and about to retire with Asia and their company into a cavern, which, as Prometheus avers, has a peculiar virtue of bringing to itself the echoes of the human world, and the lovely apparitions " Of painting, sculpture, and rapt poesy, And arts, though unimagined, yet to be.' This cavern (we may not be far wrong in thinking) is the cavern of the human mind — the recesses of creative and contemplative thought, vocal with human sympathy, fertile of human enlightenment and elevation. It is situated " beyond Indus and its tribute rivers/' or in the traditional home of the intellectual Aryan race. This is the same cavern in which Mother Earth, at the time when Prometheus became the thrall and victim of Jupiter, had panted forth her spirit in anguish, and men became mad, inhaling the breath of Earth, and raised there a temple to Jupiter, and hard by a temple also to Prometheus : emblems of that confusion and perversion of thought when the aspirations of some of the sons of men struggle against 20 SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. the superstitions and supernatural terrors of others. The plan of life which Prometheus lays out for himself and his companions in the cavern sounds vague enough : it consists in fact of mere mental and spiritual emotion, and creative or assimilative acts of thought — bodily energy has no place in it : in short, it is to be the life of the mind of man, and not of the faculties which he develops as an agent, either individually or in society. Therefore I again answer the question " Who is Prometheus ? ** by saying " He is the Mind of Man." Or let us take an illustration from zoological science. As we all know, man is zoologically defined as Homo Sapiens. Homo is his generic name, Sapiens his specific name. Shelley's Prometheus then represents to us man in his species.: he represents the Sapiens, as distinguished from the generalized Homo. My third inquiry was to be " Who is Asia ? " This point is I think a little less clear. We might be inclined to regard the union of Prometheus and Asia as the union of Mind and Body, or of Mind and Beauty, or of the Intel- lectual and the Emotional or Loving elements in the Human Soul. But all these definitions, though admissible in some partial degree, appear inadequate — they do not go far enough. It seems to me that Mrs. Shelley's observa- tion, in her note to Prometheus Unbound, is entirely right — namely, that Asia symbolizes Nature. She says : " 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 in perfect and happy union." Let us follow out this clue a little in detail. The first mention of Asia occurs in a speech of Pro- metheus at the close of the first Act. Her sister Panthea replies saying : " And Asia waits in that far Indian vale, The scene of her sad exile : rugged once And desolate and frozen, like this ravine ; But now invested with fair flowers and herbs, And haunted by sweet airs and sounds which flow Among the woods and waters, from the ether Of her transforming presence, which would fade If it were mingled not with thine." SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. 21 This strikes the exact keynote. Nature transforms a desert into a thing of beauty : but it is only by association with Mind — with Human Mind, as we know it — that Nature has substantive or conscious being : but for the mind which contemplates and imbues it, Nature would be a practical nullity — it would have no phenomenal exist- ence. When Asia, in the speech which immediately ensues, speaks of Prometheus as " that soul by which I live," she utters no rhetorical commonplace of sentiment, but announces a strict philosophical truth. In a speech of Panthea, Asia is referred to as " her whose footsteps pave the world with loveliness." The Echoes which guide Asia and Panthea on towards the throne of Demogorgon sing to Asia — " In the world unknown Sleeps a voice unspoken : By thy step alone Can its rest be broken, Child of Ocean." Nature alone, the unfathomed Evolution of Things, can bring the arcane decree into being : as expressed in the same connection, " A spell is treasured but for thee alone." She is to go " To the rents and gulfs and chasms Where the Earth reposed from spasms On the day when he and thou Parted, to commingle now : " Nature is to return to that point where the temporary divorce between herself and Human Mind, under the oppression of Jupiter, had been effected. Realizing to ourselves that Asia is Nature, we find a deepened significance in that great dialogue of hers with Demogorgon to which I have more than once referred ; for what more fitting than that Nature should narrate the course of things material, and the drama of human life and of the Mind of Man, and should finally have to inquire — Who is the author of it all ? Is it God, and what is God ? Even before this dialogue, while she stood upon the u pinnacle of rock among mountains," Asia had questioned whether or rot Earth were " the shadow of some Spirit lovelier still." After the dialogue, when Demogorgon has departed 22 SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. to operate the downfall of Jupiter, and when Asia and Panthea, with the Spirit of the Hour, are in the car, and pause " within a cloud on the top of a snowy mountain," Panthea says that the beauty of her sister has become almost unbearable. She also refers to that day of old " when the clear hyaline was cloven at thy uprise," and when " Love burst from thee and illumined earth and heaven," withother details which clearly enough apply to Aphrodite or Venus, thus identified as an embodiment, or (to borrow a word from a different theosophy) an avatar, of Nature. This, as Panthea says, was before grief eclipsed the soul of Asia : now it is the whole world which seeks her sympathy. The entire passage and its imagery bear upon that glorifying transfigurement of Nature which, according to the Shelleian idea in this drama, accompanies pari passu the liberation of the Human Mind, Prometheus. Then a " Voice in the Air " addresses Asia as " Life of Life " — " Lamp of Earth " — " all feel yet see thee never." Next follows Asia's rapturous response, the transcendent lyric, " My soul is an enchanted boat ; " which can be understood in this connection, though it half evades, half defies, analysis or exposition. She has traversed in her spirit-guided course the regions of Age, Manhood, Youth, and Infancy, passing " through Death and Birth to a diviner day — peopled by shapes too bright to see ''—for Nature is still, even in her utmost glory, a neophyte to the realms of super-Nature. After his unbinding, Prometheus addresses Asia as " light of life — shadow of beauty unbeheld : " a radiancy and a mystery — a something known to the Mind of Man, and a something obscurely intimating the unknown and unknowable. This again is Nature. And now for the fourth of our inquiries, "Who is Jupiter?" We have partly glanced at this problem already ; and have seen — what I will here re-state with more precision — that, after Prometheus the Human Mind had given him, or had ascribed to him, wisdom, Jupiter became the anthropomorphic God of theologians ; and, by that selfsame act of the Human Mind, Jupiter became the tyrant of humanity. Shelley (as is abundantly evident from his drama and from other evidence) considered that, SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. 23 in ascribing wisdom to Jupiter, in clothing Jupiter with "the dominion of wide Heaven " — or, as we may say (for this is the essence of it), in anthropomorphizing Deity — the Human Mind had committed a very great and a rue- fully fatal error : Shelley held that this anthropomorphic Deity does not really exist. Whether Shelley was right or wrong in this opinion I by no means discuss : I simply say that such was his opinion. The inference is obvious : That the Jupiter such as he subsisted by the act of the Human Mind, invested with wisdom and with the dominion of Heaven, was but a creation of the Human Mind, and could continue to exist in that character and with that potency only so long as the Human Mind, which he tormented, would tolerate his existence. The Human Mind, when first tortured by this recognized Jupiter, had cursed him, and defied him as a Fiend : at the close of the " three-thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours " the Human Mind substituted pity for hatred, and revoked the curse ; and the utter downfall of this wise and powerful — ail-but all-wise and all-powerful — Jupiter immediately ensued. These several considerations lead us to strip the Jupiter of Prometheus Unbound of the wisdom and dominion which had been delegated to him by Prometheus the Human Mind : but they do not enable us to under- stand exactly what Jupiter actually is — what he was, let us say, before Prometheus had given him wisdom which is strength, and clothed him with the dominion of wide Heaven. Pie must, at that antecedent epoch, have been something. One might at first be inclined to say that he was Time — according to that phrase in Asia's speech, " Saturn from whose throne Time fell, an envious shadow"; or that he was Fate — blind Destiny unimbued with wisdom : but Demogorgon will not allow of this, for he speaks of certain powers clearly diverse from Jupiter — "Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance, and Change — to these •All things are subject but eternal Love." I will therefore hazard another definition, and say that, as near as we can name him, Jupiter is, in his own essence, Fortune, or the Vicissitude of the World. Fortune, a power destitute of what we call moral attributes, became, when invested by the Human Mind with wisdom and 24 SHELLE Y'S PROMETHE US UN BO UND. dominion, an anthropomorphic Deity ; and his operations, being in fact capricious and unregulated, turned, when interpreted into acts of unlimited power guided by wisdom, into tyranny and evil. It may be confessed that the dramatic position of Shelley's Jupiter is an ambiguous and hardly a tenable one. As a dramatis persona he necessarily figures as wise, the sovereign of Heaven, and tyrannous to man. But (if I have correctly analysed the core of meaning in the drama) we know that he is really, in Shelley's conception, not wise nor the sovereign of Heaven, but only supposed to be so by Prometheus the Mind of Man in an initial stage of his own development ; and he is not really tyrannous to man, but only tyrannizing in and through the Mind of Man, thus imperfectly developed. This am- biguity is not inherent in the Greek legend, which, whether siding with Jupiter or with Prometheus (a point which may seem of some uncertainty), contemplates both Jupiter and Prometheus as equally real, or at any rate as equally symbolic of a real relation of the facts. It is merely inherent in the re-interpretation of the Greek legend which Shelley adopts and dramatizes. — I must now leave for your more leisurely consideration these general data concerning the Jupiter of Prometheus Unbound, and must proceed to exhibit the details of the poem upon which my view is founded. The very first words in our drama, spoken by Pro- metheus, tell us what Jupiter is. He is " Monarch of Gods and Daemons, and all Spirits — But one — who throng those bright and rolling worlds ; " he is that supreme entity which we have called the Vicissitude of the World ; he has also become the personal or anthropomorphic God of theology or of superstition ; but even so he is not the monarch of the one spirit, the Mind of Man, which persists in exercising its free-will, and in protesting against the oppression of Vicissitude. We may conceive him as an elemental and spiritual deity, robed now in oppression because the Mind of Man arbitrarily assigned to him wisdom, and dominion over the concerns of heaven and earth. Prometheus proceeds to address him as " Almighty, had I deigned to share the SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. 25 shame of thine ill tyranny'': if the Mind of Man acquiesced in all the evils that are done under the sun, if it ceased to protest against wrong, Jupiter's power would nowhere encounter any opposition. In the colloquy (so often referred to) between Asia and Demogorgon, Asia asks, " Who made terror, madness, crime, remorse," pain, and hell, or the sharp fear of hell, and other miserable evils of the state of man : and Demogorgon replies, " He reigns" — which is as much as to say " Jupiter made them." The Vicissitude of the World, construed as the will of the personal and anthropomorphic God, has produced these scourges of humankind. When Asia presses Demogorgon to define the God of whom he had previously spoken as the author of all good things in the world, whereas Jupiter is the author of evil things, Demogorgon replies — ' ' I spoke but as ye speak, For Jove is the supreme of living things." This amounts to saying — There is no personal supreme being other than Jupiter : he, as a personal supremacy, creates only evil : the Universe, and that which is good in it, subsist independently of him — they are self-subsisting, and did not come into being by any personal creative act. Then the Spirit of the Hour of Jupiter's downfall announces that Demogorgon " shall wrap in lasting night Heaven's kingless throne." Heaven will exist, and Earth will exist : but Heaven will be kingless, for Jupiter will be gone. In the ensuing scene Jupiter himself speaks : he declares that his antique empire is " built on eldest faith, and faith's coeval, fear." Not on love, not on truth, is his empire built, but on faith and fear — or (as we might paraphrase the terms) on credulity and superstitious terror : an unstable foundation, therefore a fleeting empire. And forthwith Heaven's throne becomes king- less, for Demogorgon arrives, and Jupiter sinks into end- less nothingness, " Dizzily down — ever, for ever down." We need follow him no further. As Demogorgon has just been announcing to Jupiter : — " The tyranny of Heaven none may retain, Or reassume or hold, succeeding thee." 26 SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. Under the influence of the protest of Prometheus the Human Mind, and of his final forgiveness and pity, and at the unevadeable fiat of Demogorgon, Jupiter, the personal anthropomorphic " Supreme of living things," is gone, and his place knows him no more. 11 He sunk to the abyss — to the dark void." Our fifth and last inquiry was to be " Who is Demogor- gon ? " To this there is, I suppose, only one answer, being Demogorgon's own answer to Jupiter — he is Eternity. Jupiter asks, " Awful Shape, what art thou ? Speak ! " and Demogorgon replies — " Eternity : demand no direr name." Beyond this decisive explanation, I need only cull a few illustrative details. The first mention of Demogorgon is in that speech of Mother Earth, in Act i, where she says that there are two worlds of life and death — one of these being a world of shadows, tenanted by the simulacra of the agents in the other living world, and among the shadows is "Demogorgon, a tremendous gloom." When Asia and Panthea have reached the "pinnacle of rock among mountains," they stand at the portal of Demogor- gon's realm : hence an oracular vapour is hurled up which men " call truth, virtue, love, genius, or joy — the madden- ing wine of life." These are mysterious utterances, proper to a mysterious subject : in a general way, we gather that the emotions or faculties thus referred to emanate from eternity, and partake of its nature. A " Song of Spirits " addressed to Asia and Panthea says that " the Eternal, the Immortal," is now to unloose " the snake-like doom coiled underneath his throne " : this Eternal or Immortal is none other than Demogorgon. In the interview with Jupiter, Demogorgon, immediately after declaring that he is Eternity, adds : — "lam thy child, as thou wert Saturn's child, Mightier than thee. And we must dwell together Henceforth in darkness. " As Jupiter, the Vicissitude of the World and anthro- pomorphic God, succeeded Saturn, the author of Time and patriarchal ruler of a world of semi-humanized man- kind, so Demogorgon, Eternity, succeeds Jupiter. Jupiter is merged into and abolished by Eternity. We can, I SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. 27 think, at once seize some part of Shelley's thought in this assumption : to follow it out by laboured development or a long train of ratiocination is no part of my under- taking. In the final scene of all Demogorgon re-appears, "a mighty Power which is as darkness." He speaks, with " an universal sound like words," to the Spirit of the Earth, the Spirit of the Moon, Daemons and Gods, the Dead, the Elemental Genii, the Living Creatures and Plants and Phsenomena of the Earth, and to Man ; and terminates the great ideal drama in the following words : — " This is the day which down the void abysm, At the Earth-born's spell, yawns for Heaven's despotism, And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep. Love, from its awful throne of patient power In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep, And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs, And folds over the world its healing wings. "Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance — These are the seals of that most firm assurance Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength ; And, if with infirm hand Eternity, Mother of many acts and hours, should free The serpent that would clasp her with his length, These are the spells by which to reassume An empire o'er the disentangled doom. " To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite ; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night ; To defy power which seems omnipotent ; To love and bear ; to hope till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates ; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent ; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great, and joyous, beautiful and free ; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory ! " It will be observed that, in this speech, Demogorgon refers to Eternity as if it were something other than himself: he says — "If with infirm hand Eternity, Mother of many acts and hours, should free The serpent that would clasp her with his length." This phrase need not, however, lessen our conviction that Demogorgon symbolizes Eternity. He is Eternity per- sonified — personified so far as " a power which is as 28 SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. darkness " can be called personified : and he here speaks of Eternity in its operations, under a different veil of personating words, " mother of many acts and hours." Ladies and Gentlemen, I have now accomplished my undertaking of considering the main outline and purport of Prometheus Unbound, under the head of its myth, and of its four primary personages — Prometheus, Asia, Jupiter, and Demogorgon ; and I have shown that (according to my view of the poem) Prometheus is the Mind of Man, Asia is Nature, Jupiter is the Vicissitude of the World transmuted into anthropomorphic deity, and Demogorgon is Eternity. Here therefore I might conclude : but, if you will bear with me a very little longer, I will with utmost succinctness say a few more words to sum up the intel- lectual and moral bearing of a poem than which, as Blackwood's Magazine averred in 1820, "it is quite im- possible that there should exist a more pestiferous mix- ture of blasphemy, sedition, and sensuality." I read it thus. The Universe (spoken of as Heaven, Earth, and Light) is eternal and self-existing : it had no creator. The primary powers of the Universe, or (as we may say) its spiritual functions, are Love, Fate, Occasion, Chance, and Change. Of these no beginning and no origin can be predicated, nor yet any end. Of Man, the earliest age is called the Saturnian Age, when Time became a factor in the world. Men in that age, being intellectually un- developed, lived a natural and therefore so far a happy life, like animals, or indeed like plants. Ultimately Human Mind was evolved, or, mythically speaking, Pro- metheus came into being, and was united to Nature, as in the espousals of man and wife. One of the first acts of Human Mind was to create a God in his own image : he assigned wisdom to Jupiter — that is, to the Vicissitude of the World — and ascribed to him the dominion of Heaven, stipulating only that man should be free — free in will and in act. The mere animal happiness, or natural conformity, of man had lapsed with the birth of Mind : under the theocracy which the mind of man had estab- lished, everything went amiss. The natural operations of the Vicissitude of the World, such as want, toil, and SHELLEY'S PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. 29 disease, became grievously oppressive when they were regarded as the decree of Omniscient Omnipotence ; and the spirit of mankind was a theatre of dismal cravings and chafings. To this catastrophe of all human well-being the Mind of Man supplied numerous and noble palliatives ; but it sank beneath the stern theocratic sway — Prometheus was bound and tortured. Still the potential remedy for the multiform and monstrous evil remained in the human mind itself — it remains in the human mind at this moment. When the mind shall finally have rejected the delusions (such Shelley considered them) of theocracy, and shall have purged itself of the dark passions of hatred and revenge, then will the moment of emancipation be sound- ing. Eternity itself will conspire with the human mind to launch the world of man upon a new career — a career of boundless progression, in which even the planet which man inhabits will participate. The theocracy, with all its attendant evils, will vanish into nothingness ; the Human Mind will be re-united to Nature in indissoluble and bound- less concord ; and only chance and death and mutability will dispute with man the future of his globe. Printed by Richard Clay & Sons, Bread Street Hill, October. 1886. M