that began so importantly may be saved from so singularly flat a winding-up.”
Now not only does all this seem true in such cases,
but we have similar feelings about even so ideal a
picture of happy future life as is Shelley’s, in the last
act of the “Prometheus.” There are indeed many
deeper elements in that noble ideal of Shelley’s, for
he distinctly says that his true ideal is “Man — Oh!
not men”; or, as he again expresses it: —
- “One undivided soul of many a soul
- Whose nature is its own diviue control,
- Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea.”
And when he says this, he gets far beyond mere hedonism. But yet there are other elements in his account that are not so satisfactory, and that are decidedly hedonistic. Their expression is indeed perfect. Surely if the noblest hedonism could ever succeed with us through the noblest of statements, such an advocate as Shelley would convince us. But when the poet glorifies mere individual pleasure, as he does in part of his picture, our clearest reflection is that, after all, the end of the tragedy is petty when compared with the beginning.
For consider what a world it is in which we begin the poem. At first glance it is a gloomy and terrible world of brutal wrong. But soon the picture grows brighter, even while the wrong is depicted. There is the glorious figure of the suffering Titan, there is the sweetness of the tender love that watches him; and above the tyrant himself one feels that there is somehow a heavenly might, that does not suffer him to do his worst. The world in which
