INTRODUCTION.

I.

THE DRAMA AND THE TIME.

SHELLEY'S lyrical drama, the Prometheus Unbound, is unique in the great cycle of English song. From the larger part of that song it is distinguished at once by an audacious idealism. Generalizations are dangerous; yet we may surely say that the dominant trend of our sturdy English literature has been towards realism. In the Middle Ages, English Chaucer sings with frank and buoyant vigor of the fair green earth beneath him and the men and women at his side, while Italian Dante penetrates with fervid passion the spiritual spheres open to mediæval vision, and brings back strange messages from the souls of the lost and of the blessed. The Elizabethan imagination claps a girdle round the earth, but rarely soars into the heavens. It is the German genius, not the English, which expresses the struggle of the human soul in a shadowy protagonist, embodiment of the symbolism of the ages, and replaces a Hamlet known to history by a legendary Faust. The idealism of Milton seems, beside that of Dante, intellectual and forced. The literature of the eighteenth century is the transcript of the life of society; Victorian literature is the transcript of the life of the

soul. Everywhere our English genius tends to express itself through forms of experience and of fact.

The early poetry of the nineteenth century is a notable exception to this principle. The work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, of Keats and Shelley, is in tone frankly ideal. The idealism which pervades all the writings of these poets, from the Ancient Mariner to Hyperion, finds its fullest and most glorious manifestation in the Prometheus Unbound, which is the supreme achievement of Shelley. Despite the wondrous nature-poetry of the drama, the whole action takes place, not on this solid earth of hill and forest, but in an unknown region which has no existence outside the soul of man. The personages are vast abstractions, dim though luminous; like wraiths of mist in morning sunlight they drift around us, appearing, vanishing, in mystic sequence. Over the whole drama plays, though with broken and wavering lustre, the "light that never was on sea or land," and not once does the "poet's dream" change to the sober world of waking fact.

Yet to speak of the Prometheus Unbound as the highest expression of modern English idealism is hardly to justify our claim that the drama is unique. We find much contemporary poetry of the same order, although less great; and our English genius is, moreover, too plastic to lack entirely, at any period, the ideal element. It is in a work of the sixteenth century that we find the closest parallel to the Prometheus Unbound. Edmund Spenser, during the full dominance of Elizabethan realism, is as pure an idealist as Shelley, and the Faery Queene and the modern drama are in many ways strangely akin. At a glance, this kinship is obvious. The two poems belong alike to that highest

order of imaginative work which includes the Book of Job, Faust, Paracelsus, and claims as its greatest example the Divine Comedy of Dante. Both poems deal with spiritual forces, with the eternal conflict of good and evil; the action to be wrought out is in both the final redemption of the soul of man. The Faery Queene, like the Prometheus, transports us to an unreal world, where forms of visionary beauty speak to us, not of concrete human life, but of ethical and spiritual truth. Both poems, in a word, are symbolic.

Yet the more thoughtfully we read, the sooner will a radi-. cal difference between the spirit of the two poems become manifest, -a difference so great that it will force us to put the poem of Shelley quite by itself. For the Faery Queene is an allegory; the Prometheus Unbound not only deals with mythological conceptions, it is a genuine myth.

In the Faery Queene, the relation of the forms to the ideas is the result of the conscious and deliberate invention of Spenser. Una, says the poet to himself, shall stand for Truth, Guyon for Temperance, Archimago for Hypocrisy. The characters, thus laden with double meaning, are made to pass through various significant adventures. Sometimes the allegory grows tedious to Spenser, and he drops it from consciousness, seeing for the time in his creations only ladies faire and lovely knights, instead of the Christian virtues; more often still it grows tedious to the reader, who gladly forgets all didactic suggestion, to wander dreamily through an enchanted land. The connection between story and meaning, not only here but in all allegories, is arbitrary rather than essential.

No one can read the Prometheus Unbound without feeling a different method of conception at work. Asia, Ione,

Panthea, Prometheus himself, all the actors in the drama, are indeed impersonations of abstract qualities, and the whole action is spiritual in undercurrent, though on the surface natural. But the connection between natural and spiritual is no longer arbitrary. There has been no painful invention, unless in some minor details; these figures have flashed upon the inner vision of the poet in perfect unity of soul and form. Where an allegory is reasoned and labored, `a myth is instinctive and spontaneous. The systematic formality of the allegory is replaced in the myth by something of the large, divinely simple significance of the very symbolism of nature. An allegory is the result of experience; a myth, of intuition.

Now, to speak of the Prometheus Unbound as a myth seems at first sight to involve a contradiction. It is inconsistent with our idea of poetic development; for the evolution of the myth is almost entirely confined to the childhood of races. This is inevitable, since the myth is an unconscious form of art, and unconsciousness belongs to childhood. The wide-eyed and reverent wonder of the child sees in this new world of life and mystery around him spiritual creations pressing everywhere through the material veil. His instinctive faith cannot survive the familiarity with earthly facts, the scientific temper, of maturity. Analysis has replaced intuition; wonder is lost in curiosity.

"There was an awful rainbow full in Heaven:
We know its name and nature; it is given
In the dull catalogue of common things,"

mourns Keats. Thus it is in the infancy of the Aryan race, in the early days of Hellas, in the vigorous youth of the

Norsemen, that we find the great myth cycles treasured by our scholars to-day, - poem-stories, with the dawn-light fresh upon them. Through our own oldest epic, Beowulf, even yet flash traces of the myth; but they soon fade out, never to reappear, replaced by the frank and sunny naturalism of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Browning.

Never to reappear? Not so. In the early days of our own century, when the English race had passed through many a stern experience, when it had gathered much of the bitter wisdom of maturity into its thought and speech, once more it was to dream dreams and see visions, and the fairest of these dreams was to be given to the world through the poet-soul of Shelley, a genuine and beautiful myth, in the form of the Prometheus Unbound. Prometheus, Asia, Ione, - their likeness is to be sought, not in a Macbeth, a Desdemona, or a Pompilia, but in Thetis the silver-footed, in Perseus, slayer of the Gorgon, in Athene, child of Zeus. The mystic action of the drama recalls, not the human stir and passion of our modern tragedy, but the solemn movement of the stories of the elder world. The Prometheus Unbound is no mere retelling of an ancient tale, like the Greek poems of William Morris; it is in all essentials an original conception. The drama starts, indeed, from the Æschylean story, but the development of the action, the personages, the mode of treatment, are absolutely the poet's Like the tales of gods and heroes in the Homeric cycle, even more like the treatment of these stories with a fuller spiritual consciousness in the work of the Greek tragedians, are the great imaginings of Shelley.

own.

The age of Pope and the age of Tennyson are both times of peculiar self-consciousness and elaboration. Between