Shelley, a poem, with other writings relating to Shelley, to which is added an essay on the poems of William Blake/Notes on the Structure of "Prometheus Unbound"
NOTES ON THE STRUCTURE OF SHELLEY'S "PROMETHEUS UNBOUND."[1]
A FEW notes on certain peculiarities of structure of this greatest work of our supreme lyrical poet—peculiarities to which, so far as I am aware, attention has not hitherto been publicly called, save in one specified instance—may prove interesting to some of your readers. The substance of these notes was communicated several years ago to Mr. W. M. Rossetti on the occasion of his two-volume edition of Shelley's poems (1870).
I. Is there not some confusion in the dialogue between the Earth and Prometheus leading up to the fine "effect" of Jupiter's own Phantasm being evoked to recite the tremendous curse against Jupiter? Prometheus calls upon the Mountains, the Springs, the Air, the Whirlwinds for the curse which he would now recall. They respond one after another, giving voice to the convulsion of terror wherewith it agonized them, and the Earth, closing the responses, tells how the Caverns, the hollow Heaven, and the waves of Ocean resounded "Misery!" The convulsion of terror is obviously natural; but wherefore the cry of "Misery!" when the curse smote the fell Tyrant of Earth and Heaven, and predicted his fall? When the curse has been recited to Prometheus, and he avows that he repents and recalls it, the Earth cries, naturally enough,
Misery, oh misery to me,
That Jove at length should vanquish thee;
and the naturalness of this misery at the revocation makes more startling the apparent unnaturalness of the misery at the imprecation.
To this first speech of the Earth and those of the elements preceding, the Titan answers,
I hear a sound of voices: not the voice
Which I gave forth;
and he goes on urging his Mother and his Brethren to comply with his appeal. The Earth answers, "They dare not"; and this he understands, for he asks, "Who dares?" Then an awful whisper rises up, tingling as lightning tingles, an "inorganic voice," which he feels, but cannot comprehend, and the Earth says:—
How canst thou hear
Who knowest not the language of the dead?
This is in her living, intelligible voice, for he responds:—
Thou art a living spirit: speak as they.
And the Earth answers:—
I dare not speak like life, lest Heaven's fell King
Should hear, and link me to some wheel of pain
More torturing than the one whereon I roll.
And this is in her inarticulate voice; for she calls upon him to earnestly hearken, with but a faint struggling hope that so he may apprehend. And he does not apprehend; only awful thoughts sweep obscurely through his brain, and he feels faint with vague emotion; and the Earth, still inarticulately, murmurs in despair,
No, thou canst not hear:
Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known
Only to those who die,
just as afterwards (Act III. sc. iii. v. 110) she says to Asia, who questions her about death:—
It would avail not to reply;
Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known
But to the uncommunicating dead.
Prometheus demands, "And what art thou, O melancholy Voice?" and she answers in a long speech beginning, "I am the Earth, thy mother," and this speech is in her natural living voice, for he clearly comprehends it, replying, "Venerable mother!" and she continues the same voice in a second speech, which also by his reply he clearly comprehends; yet in these two great speeches, uttered in the voice that is heard of the Gods (since the other, vv. 140-1, is distinguished as the voice the Gods hear not), she seems to have quite forgotten her fear of "Heaven's fell King"; extolling Prometheus, bewailing his martyrdom, denouncing with the utmost freedom "our almighty Tyrant," avowing "a mother's hate breathed on her child's destroyer," branding the Gods as the offspring of "all-prolific Evil." By this fearless out-speaking in the very spirit of the Titan's curse, whose subsequent revocation, as already noticed, she vehemently laments, the Earth, to my understanding, sharply contradicts herself, and altogether stultifies the evocation of the Phantasm of Jupiter, by destroying all the reasons alleged for recourse to it.
II. There appears considerable confusion as to the time occupied by the action of the drama—what may be termed the interior time of the poem. As for its date or exterior time, this is, of course, in an ideal aeon beyond the range of chronology, unimpeached by anachronism; so that, notwithstanding the antiquity of the dramatis personæ and fable, the catastrophe points to a far apocalyptic future, and the allusions to the most recent discoveries of science are just as much in place as those to prehistoric traditions. In the beginning we are told that Panthea and Ione are seated at the feet of Prometheus: "Time, Night. During the Scene, Morning slowly breaks." And this single scene occupies the whole of Act I., throughout which the two Oceanides are awake watching ("Ever thus we watch and wake," v. 230); witnessing and chorally commenting the apparition of the Phantasm of Jupiter, the arrival and departure of Mercury, the assaults of the Furies, the vision of Christ, the ministrations of the Spirits. At the end of this act Panthea bids farewell to Prometheus (note likewise her precedent speech and his answer), giving reason for her going:—
But the eastern star looks white,
And Asia waits in that far Indian vale,
The scene of her sad exile.
In the opening of Act II. Asia is awaiting Panthea:—
This is the season, this the day, the hour;
At sunrise thou shouldst come, sweet Sister mine;
＊＊＊＊＊
The point of one white star is quivering still
Deep in the orange light of widening morn
Beyond the purple mountains.
When Panthea arrives, and is told "How late thou art!" she replies,
Pardon, great Sister! but my wings were faint
With the delight of a remembered dream;
and in her next speech,
As I have said,
With our Sea-Sister at his feet I slept.
＊＊＊＊＊
Then two dreams came. One I remember not.
But in the other;
and she goes on to relate it, ending:—
I listened through the night when sound was none,
Ione wakened then, and said to me:
＊＊＊＊＊
I answered not, for the eastern star grew pale,
But fled to thee.
The identity of time is marked in the three leading passages by the same closing signal, the paling or whitening of the eastern star.
We have thus, as it appears to me, the manifest contradiction that in Act I. Panthea and Ione are watching the action and bearing part in the dialogue throughout the dawning of this first day up to the moment of Panthea's departure to visit Asia; while in the opening of Act II. they are both sleeping, Panthea dreaming, throughout the same period, save the last moments, in which Panthea gathers her thoughts and listens, and Ione wakens and speaks.
Following on with this first scene of Act II., we find that almost immediately Panthea's other dream appears (and this Dream, as a Shape that speaks, ought to be in the list of dramatis personæ along with the Phantasm, the Spirits, and the Echoes), and Asia, picturing it, concludes:—
Yet 'tis a thing of air,
For through its grey robe gleams the golden dew
Whose stars the noon has quenched not.
The Echoes also which come after the Dream with the same summons, "Follow! Follow!" sing of "the noon-tide darkness deep" of the caverns, and "the woodland noontide dew"; and Asia and Panthea "follow ere the voices fade away." Yet at the end of scene ii., when they have thus passed into the forest, the second Faun says,
But should we stay to speak, noontide would come,
And thwart Silenus find his goats undrawn,
leaving us still in the forenoon.
Still Act II.: sc. iii., we are again in dawn, with the mist breaking,
And far on high the keen sky-cleaving mountains
From icy spires of sun-like radiance fling
The dawn.
The opening words, "Hither the sound has borne us," as well as the second chant of semichorus i. in the preceding scene, suggest a rapture-swift journey, although the last song of the Echoes in sc. i. enumerates immense tracts to be traversed; but, as we can scarcely be still in the dawning of the first day, we must, it appears, conceive that Asia and Panthea have been borne on the "plume-uplifting wind" and the billows of the "storm of sound,"
By the forests, lakes, and fountains,
Through the many-folded mountains;
To the rents, and gulphs, and chasms,
and at length to this "Pinnacle of Rock among Mountains," from midday to night and all through the night. This apparently long stretch of hours for the buoyant flight of these immortals may have been intentional on the part of the poet, as expounding an awful remoteness in the Cave of Demogorgon; and, if the vulgar relations of geographical horology were in his mind, the vaster the interval of space the less the sun-marked interval of time, whether the flight swept eastward to encounter a second dawn or westward to overtake the first. On the other hand, we seem to be still in the regions of the Indian Caucasus; nor is it easy to imagine those enchanted eddies of echoes, which draw all spirits on that secret way (sc. ii. vv. 41-5) to the cave, circling with potent attraction at an enormous distance from their centre. On the whole, it seems to me impossible to decide from the text whether this dawn is of the first or of the second day; though probably it was the latter in the mind of the poet, who, we must remember, did not write, as we may read, his lyrical drama at a sitting, but with intervals of nights and days.
From this dawn, at the invocation of the spirits, Asia and Panthea descend "Down, down!" to their interview with Demogorgon; and this interview, though not long, leads us into night, sc. iv. v. 129, et seq.:—
The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night
I see cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds.
＊＊＊＊＊
And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars.
At first we might think "night" here a general term, expressing the gloom of the cave even when the roofing rocks were cloven, and think of the stars as visible by day because of the awful profundity; but when (vv. 150-5) the terrible Shadow floats up from its throne and ascends the dark chariot of the destined Hour, the exclamation of Panthea is too definite for mistake:
—watch its path among the stars,
Blackening the night!
So that when, just before, the Spirit of the Hour announces,
Ere yon planet
Has set, the Darkness which ascends with me
Shall wrap in lasting night Heaven's kingless throne,
the "yon planet" must be some particular star or the unmentioned moon; and the fall of Jupiter is fixed for this very night, whether of the first or the second day.
Asia and Panthea ascend the car of another Spirit (whose invitation, by-the-bye, is to the daughter, not daughters, of Ocean), who chants of her speed,
Ere the cloud piled on Atlas can dwindle
We encircle the earth and the moon:
We shall rest from long labours at noon:
and in sc. v. we are "On the brink of the night and the morning." Panthea asks, "Whence is the light? the sun is yet unrisen"; the Spirit answers, "The sun will rise not until noon." We are thus entering on a new day, whether the second or the third, and appear to have already advanced beyond the time of the opening of Act III., which precedes the fall of Jupiter, whose fall was to occur before the setting of "yon planet" of the previous night.
And, indeed, the strife with Demogorgon and the fall of Jupiter did occur, as predicted, that same night; for in Act III. sc. ii., having related the catastrophe to Ocean, apparently immediately after its fulfilment, Apollo says:—
But list! I hear
The small clear silver lute of the young Spirit
That sits i' the Morning Star.
Ocean.Thou must away:
Thy steeds will pause at even, till when farewell.
So that it is now about sunrise, not a hint being given by Apollo that he is rising at a later hour than usual; he is summoned by the Morning Star. What, then, becomes of "The sun will rise not until noon" already cited? True, in commencing his relation, Apollo says that the strife "made dim the orb I rule, and shook the solid stars"; this, however, is not apposite to earthly time, whether of night or day, but to the universal convulsion produced by the celestial catastrophe. The other words of the Spirit of the Hour, "We shall rest from long labours at noon," may be understood as pointing to the time of Act III. sc. iii., the release and triumph of Prometheus, at which this Spirit with Asia and Panthea is present. What, we may venture to ask, is the reason for this aerial excursion? which does not even appear to be required as a motive for the divine poetry of Act II. sc. v., with the exception of a very few lines; for it is to be remarked that the ecstatic voyage so gloriously chanted by Asia, past Age, Manhood, Youth, Infancy, "Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day," is not and cannot be proper to the chariot of the Hour, but is "In music's most serene dominions" floating "upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing," inward beatitude expressed and responded to by outward radiance of beauty and rapture of swift far flight and intoxication of spiritual harmony. The real reason, I think, is twofold, a double stem rooted in one artistic instinct: first, the impulse to balance and contrast the masculine Spirit of a dreadful countenance in his dark chariot, the exponent of the agony and terror of the Doom dethroning Jupiter, with the feminine Spirit of the dovelike eyes of hope in her ivory shell inlaid with crimson fire, the exponent of the glory and bliss of the triumph of the Titan; and, secondly, to balance and complement this triumph with one of equal splendour of ostentation for his Bride rejoining him; and here Shelley's artistic instinct was at one with his fervid faith in the high equality of the sexes.
In Act III. sc. iii. Prometheus sends this feminine spirit to announce throughout the universe the final victory of Good over Evil: "Once again outspeed the sun around the orbèd world"; and she on her return (sc. iv.) describes the effects of this announcement; yet before her return from this rapid mission the Spirit of the Earth, the guide of Prometheus and his companions almost immediately after the departure of the other, tells Asia that he is grown wiser "within this day," and relates the great musical announcement and the like effects of beatific transformation following it, as witnessed by himself "lately," when his path lay through a great city, first in the night and then when the dawn came; which night and dawn, with the "lately," throw back the restoration certainly before the Spirit of the Hour could have proclaimed it, strictly even before the noon-triumph of Prometheus. Nor does this Spirit's delay after the proclamation, "I wandering went among the haunts and dwellings of mankind," affect the anachronism. Finally, at the end of the drama, as we read in Demogorgon's concluding speech, we are still in the very day of the catastrophe:—
This is the day which down the void abysm
At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism.
It is assuredly no very high work, thus extorting from a great poem an exact account of its employment of every hour, as if it were a prisoner at the bar whose defence rested on an alibi; but zealous and accurate students will not disdain it in its own lower sphere any more than such students disdain precise measurements of proportion in great works of painting and sculpture. And, not to speak of similar investigations concerning other dramas, men no less justly eminent than Jean Paul Richter and De Quincey have applied such criticism to the period of the action of "Paradise Lost."[2]
III. Is there any possible conciliation of the two caves in Act III. sc. iii.? Prometheus is no sooner released than he describes elaborately to Asia and her fair sister nymphs a certain forest cave, with fountain and stalactites, "A simple dwelling, which shall be our own," and yet more elaborately the mode of life he and they shall lead there. Then he sends the Spirit of the Hour on her swift errand of proclamation, which done, "Return; and thou shalt dwell beside our cave," i.e., the cave which he has just described. Then immediately he invokes the Earth, "O, Mother Earth!" who exults in the warmth of immortal youth already circling through her marble nerves, and the blessedness which shall henceforth be the dower of all her children, and then describes elaborately a certain cavern where her spirit was panted forth in anguish under the evil domination of Jupiter—an oracular Delphic cavern, also in a forest, but distinguished by a noble temple, whose image ever lies in a windless and crystalline pool; and she tells Prometheus, "This cave is thine," and calls the child Spirit of the Earth to guide him and his company to it,
beyond the peak
Of Bacchic Nysa, Mænad-haunted mountain,
And beyond Indus and its tribute rivers.
Again, is there any possible conciliation of the two temples (apparently meant for one and the same), as characterized in this single speech of the Earth before and after the Spirit has been called? Here is the first in the poet's own words, surely a temple of Evil:—
There is a cavern where my spirit
Was panted forth in anguish whilst thy pain
Made my heart mad, and those that did inhale it
Became mad too, and built a temple there,
And spoke, and were oracular, and lured
The erring nations round to mutual war,
And faithless faith, such as Jove kept with thee.
Here is the second from the same speech, surely a temple of Good:—
Beside the windless and crystalline pool,
Where ever lies, on unerasing waves,
The image of a temple, built above,
Distinct with column, arch, and architrave,
And palm-like capital, and over wrought,
And populous most with living imagery,
Praxitelean shapes, whose marble smiles
Fill the hushed air with everlasting love.
It is deserted now, but once it bore
Thy name, Prometheus; there the emulous youths
Bore to thy honour thro' the divine gloom
The lamp which was thine emblem. . . .
Beside that temple is the destined cave.
So astonishing, indeed, to my apprehension, is the irreconcilable duality pervading these last two scenes of Act III. (which originally concluded the drama)—the two records of the effects of the proclamation of the triumph of Prometheus, the two caves, and the two temples—that remote commentators may be pardoned if they divine and affirm a double authorship or redaction, such as scholars of our own day distinguish in the Elohistic and Jehovistic legends, not fused but confused, in the book of Genesis.
IV. It may be worth while to note the passages which mark the sex and the immortality or mortality of the Hours, or Spirits of the Hours as they are termed in the Dramatis Personæ, although Demogorgon at their first apparition (II. iv.) simply says, "These are the immortal Hours." They are here spoken of collectively as masculine; Asia, addressing the one with whom Demogorgon ascends, cries:—
Unlike thy brethren, ghastly charioteer,
Who art thou?
The young Spirit with whom Asia and Panthea ascend is first spoken of in the neuter, as we often speak of a child, "How its soft smiles attract the soul!" but afterwards (III. iii.) as feminine, "Ione, give her that curved shell," and only one of many such:—
Thou most desired Hour, more loved and lovely
Than all thy sisters.
But in Act IV. the Chorus of Hours (not Spirits of the Hours)—the living Hours as distinguished from the foregoing dark Forms and Shadows who chant,
Spectres we
Of the dead Hours be,
We bear Time to his tomb in Eternity—
are again masculine, singing of themselves,
And each one who waked as his brother slept
Found the truth worse than his visions were,
it being observable that both Semichorous I. and II. have part in these lines. And it will be noted that we have dead Hours, although Demogorgon himself termed them immortal.
V. And on this one point I see that Mr. Forman has a supplementary note of the same general purport as mine; there appears to be some confusion of the Earth and the Spirit of the Earth (both in the Dramatis Personæ), and of the Moon and the Spirit of the Moon (only the latter in the Dramatis Personæ, and placed there by Mrs. Shelley). Throughout the first three acts the Earth is the great Mother, and is clearly distinguished from "the delicate Spirit that guides the earth through heaven " (III. iv.), the male child, yet ancient, for "before Jove reigned it loved Asia" and came to call her Mother, as it calls her now, meeting again, in the drama. In the same scene Asia says to it:
And never will we part, till thy chaste Sister,
Who guides the frozen and inconstant moon,
Will look on thy more warm and equal light
Till her heart thaw like flakes of April snow,
And love thee.
Sp. of the Earth. What! as Asia loves Prometheus?
Asia. Peace, wanton! thou art not yet old enough.
In Act IV., that glorious afterthought, composed several months subsequently, lone and Panthea describe at length the wonderful vision of these Spirits triumphant: that of the Moon a winged infant in a chariot like the crescent; that of the Earth laid asleep "Like to a child o'erwearied with sweet toil," within the rushing sphere which is as many thousand spheres. Immediately after these descriptions comes the sublime rapturous and enamoured antiphonal chanting, not of the Spirits, but simply of the Earth and the Moon, according to the headings of the alternate strophes. Yet not the Moon but only her Spirit is in the Dramatis Personæ; and she addresses the Earth not as the great Mother, but as "Brother mine" and "Orb most beautiful"; and when their chanting is over, Panthea says:—
The bright visions,
Wherein the singing Spirits rode and shone,
Gleam like pale meteors through a watery night.
On the other hand, the chaste Sister of the Moon expresses to her Brother of the Earth, still a winged child, that very love Asia predicted, but for which she said to him, "Thou art not yet old enough." Passing over the distinction between the Moon and her Spirit, which to me is as subtile and inappreciable as that between the Hours and the Spirits of the Hours, either used indifferently, I conceive that though we have here the Spirit of the Earth in the description and the Earth named in the lyrical duologue, the chanting Earth of this fourth act is, in truth, neither the mythological Mother nor the simple Child-Spirit of the preceding acts, but, as was imperative for the full development of the poet's thought, our own natural Earth, the living, enduring root of these and all other conceptions, mythologic, imaginative, rational; the animate World-sphere instinct with Spirit, personified as masculine in relation to the feminine Moon, as it would be no less rightly personified as feminine in relation to the masculine Sun: the inspired Singer, soaring impetuously into a far ideal future, casting off from him all in his first conceptions that could limit or impede his flight, retaining and expanding and including all that could forward it, in this great cosmic conception, most real and most ideal, perfect, all-pregnant and all-comprehensive, for us her little children.
VI. There are one or two apparent inadvertencies in what may be called the "argument," similar in kind, though inferior in degree, to what has been touched upon under I. in the dialogue between the Earth and Prometheus.
(a) In Act II. iv., when Asia asks Demogorgon, "What canst thou tell?" he replies, "All that thou dar'st demand." Yet when she persistently presses him to reveal the supreme Author of Evil, the master to whom Jupiter is but the slave, he has to avow his impotence:—
If the abysm
Could vomit forth its secrets......But a voice
Is wanting, the deep truth is imageless.
Asia. So much I asked before, and my heart gave
The response thou hast given; and of such truths
Each to itself must be the oracle.
(b) In the opening of Act III. Jupiter exultantly announces to the congregated Powers of Heaven the coming of the incarnation of
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 redescend and trample out the insurrectionary Soul of Man; the Child of himself and Thetis,
Two mighty Spirits, mingling, made a third Mightier than either.
He hears the approach of the awaited Incarnation, the thunder of the fiery wheels griding the winds; he shouts:—
Feelest thou not, O World!
The earthquake of his chariot thundering up
Olympus?
Yet on the arrival of Demogorgon he cries, "Awful Shape, what art thou? Speak!" It is barely possible to conceive that Demogorgon in his actual Apparition was more tremendous and awful than the Incarnation which Jupiter expected. Why, then, this question? Dramatically it may be justified by either of two contrary reasons: Jupiter, still exultant, still assured of complete triumph, calls for glorious (or éclatanté) confirmation of his boasts to the assembled Deities; or Jupiter, thrilled suddenly with fateful presentiments of catastrophe, divining inexplicable hostility where he looked for irresistible reinforcement, cries in real astonishment underheaved by vague terror: the student must decide which by his own dramatic instinct.
(c) In the opening of Act IV. Ione questions, "What dark forms were they?" and "Whither have they fled?" and Panthea tells her. Yet these dark forms have just sung who they are, and whither they go; and the introduction says that both Panthea and Ione awaken gradually during the first song, strictly the Voice of Unseen Spirits which precedes the chant of these dark forms and shadows.
VII. Lastly, I may mention here one or two apparent inadvertences which scarcely affect the structure, but seem beyond any now possible textual emendation.
(a) In Act III. sc. iii. we read:—
Asia. Oh, Mother! wherefore speak the name of death?
Cease they to love and move and breathe and speak
Who die?
The Earth. It would avail not to reply:
Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known
But to the uncommunicating dead.
Death is the veil which those who live call life:
They sleep, and it is lifted.
Here, to my understanding, the word "tongue" does not express, though it suggests, the real meaning. The Earth is speaking in her natural living voice and language, and, I suppose, intends to say, "This theme is intelligible," or something equivalent. In the parallel passages already quoted from her dialogue with Prometheus,
How canst thou hear
Who knowest not the language of the dead?
and
No, thou canst not hear:
Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known
Only to those who die,—
the words "languge" and "tongue" are correctly used, as the Earth is speaking in a strange language, with an "inorganic voice." I may be permitted to suggest that Shelley probably wrote this line "Thou art immortal, and this tongue is known," a second time in consequence of having written it before, while forgetting that he had indeed written it before, unconsciously accepting the dictation of reminiscence—a dictation to which he, one of the most original of poets, was remarkably subject, as all his real students must be aware, whether the reminiscence was of his own or another's language. Thus the close of the citation from the Earth's speech has its parallel in the opening of a sonnet written the year before:
Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life.
(b) In Act IV. Ione, describing the vision of the Spirit of the Moon, begins:—
I see a chariot like that thinnest boat
In which the Mother of the Months is borne
By ebbing night into her western cave,
When she upsprings from interlunar dreams;
O'er which is curved an orblike canopy
Of gentle darkness.
Surely the crescent moon is borne into her western cave not by ebbing night, but by flowing, advancing night, or by the ebbing day; and surely no one ever knew this better than did that marvellous elemental genius, more at home in the heavens than most men are on earth. Mark, however, the parallel passage from this same poem, in which the ebbing here repeated so inopportunely is the very right word to use. Act III. sc. ii. Ocean says:—
As mortals see
The floating bark of the light-laden moon
With that white star, its sightless pilot's crest,
Borne down the rapid sunset's ebbing sea.
May it be suggested in this case also that the inadvertent second use of the word ebbing was in unconscious reminiscence of the first right use? For another description of the crescent moon, see The Triumph of Life, vv. 78-84:—
Like the young moon,
When on the sunlit limits of the night
Her white shell trembles amid crystal air,
And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might
Doth, as the herald of its coming, bear
The ghost of her dead mother, whose dim form
Bends in dark ether from her infant's chair;
the same omen of tempest having been marked by Coleridge, with a reference to what he terms "the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens"; the antiquity since much disputed.
(c) Near the end of Act IV. Demogorgon summons
Ye happy Dead! whom beams of brightest verse
Are clouds to hide, not colours to portray,
Whether your nature is that universe
Which once ye saw and suffered
A Voice from Beneath.Or as they
Whom we have left, we change and pass away.
Is there any real meaning in this response? They whom the dead have left are their living fellows, who only change and pass away in becoming also of the dead. Nor can I discern any real disjunctive opposition between the changing and passing away and the being re-absorbed into the universe.
There are other questions of far finer subtlety and far broader scope suggested by this sublime lyrical drama, as well as some interesting points of textual criticism, whose discussion I must here forego. But as these notes may appear of a depreciatory tendency, I may be permitted to remark that the peculiarities of structure I have pointed out, the unessential self-contradictions and inadvertences, are not only pardonable as instances of the "brave neglect" which Pope here and there discovered in Homer, but have a certain wild charm of their own as characteristics proving that in Shelley the poet and the man were one. We all know how conspicuous in his life was a sort of quasi-freedom from the usual limitations of time and space, a disregard of men's common hours and seasons, a restless flying hither and thither and anywhither from men's common settled domesticity; and we know, moreover, in what a confusion of dreams or visions or hallucinations with worldly realities he was often involved. Jefferson Hogg| has told us delightfully of his most uncustomary customs, his irregular hours and modes of eating and sleeping and so forth, his sudden mysterious flittings and reappearances; Trelawny has noted how he would glide into the home circle and vanish from it, as if the very Ariel whose name he assumed; Leigh Hunt has left on record how he gave the impression of a spirit that had wandered from its proper sphere; and these eerie, lawless ways and traits only intensified the fascination wrought by his ardent purity and goodness and genius upon all who knew him well, being worthy to know him.
I may also observe that no great artist as a great artist can resent the most microscopic criticism of his work, however much he may contemn the microscopic critics, who give themselves altogether to the examination of minute points because they are incapable of large views of the grandeur of the whole. No doubt that laziest and haziest of human animals, the "general reader,"—so termed we may suppose because he studies nothing in particular and rests content with the vaguest views of things in general,—is simply wearied and disgusted by any detailed analysis; but
Grandeur of the perfect sphere
Thanks the atoms that cohere;
and the said "general reader" has, in truth, no definite perception or conception either of the atoms or the sphere. The genuine artist welcomes from others that scrupulous criticism both of the parts and the whole which is but the exterior continuation of his own interior self-criticism; and no multiplicity of minutest details can be wearisome or insignificant in any realm of art to such as are native to that realm, whether active producers or only passive inheritors of its priceless treasures.
And finally I urge for myself in this case the plea whose efficacy I willingly allow when urged by or for any other in like case, the plea indicated by Mr. Swinburne in his valuable "Notes on the Text of Shelley":—"Were it for me to pass sentence, I would say of the very rashest of possible commentators that his errors, though they were many, should be forgiven, if he loved much." Whatever my rashness and errors, certainly I love and have loved much, from the earliest study of my youth through thirty long years; I yield to no one living in the fulness of my tribute of gratitude and love and reverence, as no one in the measure of his or her capacity can be indebted for fuller delight and inspiration to this glorious poet of the glorious possible future of Humanity, "in one word, and that the only proper word, Divine."
1881.
- ↑ Reprinted from the Athenæum, by permission of the proprietors.
- ↑ In Mure's "Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece" (Vol. I., Appendix F: "On the 'Self-ontradictions' of Virgil, Milton, Cervantes, Walter Scott, and other popular Authors, as compared with those of Homer) some of Milton's anachronisms in a single book of the "Paradise Lost" are thus summarized:—"Milton informs us that when the Messiah came down from heaven [near sunset, x. 92] to judge our first parents, after the Fall, Satan, shunning his presence, returned to hell by night (x. 341). On his way he meets Sin and Death on their road to Paradise in the morning (x. 329). After Sin and Death had arrived in Paradise, Adam is represented as lamenting aloud to himself 'through the still night' (x. 846). The ensuing day (assuming day to have now at last really dawned) is afterwards described by the same Adam as the day of the Fall (x. 962); in another place it is described as a day several days subsequent to that of the Fall (x. 1050)."