xxxiv. 5, 6 His cradled Idol, and the sacrifice Of God to God's own wrath that Islam's creed XXXV. 9 And thrones, which rest on faith in God, nigh overturned. xxxix. 4 Of God may be appeased.' He ceased, and they xl. 5 With storms and shadows girt, sate God, alone, xliv. 9 As hush! hark! Come they yet? God, xlv. 8 Men brought their atheist kindred to appease xlvii. 6 The threshold of God's throne, and it was she! Canto XI. xvi. 1 Ye turn to God for aid in your distress; xxv. 7 Swear by your dreadful God.'-'We swear, we swear! Canto XII. x. 9 Truly for self, thus thought that Christian Priest indeed, xi. 9 A woman? God has sent his other victim here. Will I stand up before God's golden throne, An Atheist; but for me she would have known In torment and in fire have Atheists gone; xxx. 4 How Atheists and Republicans can die. IN THE REVOLT OF ISLAM, Shelley unites the landscape and sentiment of ALASTOR with the didactic teaching of QUEEN MAB. In political and social philosophy he shows no intellectual advance, though it is noticeable that in the preface he disclaims responsibility for the views which have a dramatic propriety in reference to the character they are designed to elucidate' and are injurious to the character' of the benevolences' of the Deity, and which he says are widely different' from his own; and it should be remarked that his expressions with respect to the immortality of the spirit are perceptibly more strong and favorable. It is rather on the poetic side that he shows development; but here, too, the didactic element seems to me less evenly eloquent than in QUEEN MAB, and the imaginative element less pervaded with charm than in ALASTOR. Medwin says that Shelley told him that Keats and he agreed to attempt a long poem, and that ENDYMION and THE REVOLT OF ISLAM were the fruit of this friendly rivalry. It can hardly be doubted that the deliberate ambition to compose a long work entered into the motive which prompted the poem. The new element which distinguishes THE REVOLT OF ISLAM from its predecessors is the fable, or story, which is made the vehicle of revolutionary doctrine. Shelley asserted that it was free from the intervention of the supernatural, except at the beginning and end; but the machinery and incidents are of the romantic school, in the Gothic' taste, in which his interest in fiction began, though here orientalized in sympathy with the literary taste of a time later than Monk Lewis and the young Scott. The tower-prison, the hermit's retreat, the cave of Laone with its underground entrance, the Tartarean steed,' are all in the region of romance; the human conduct of the characters the yielding of the gaolers to the hermit's voice and looks, the protest of Laon in behalf of his foes and of the tyrant, the devotion of the child to the latter, the final surrender of Laon are all in the vein of pure moral sentimentality; and though there are few such puerilities as the 'small knife' and the eagle who could not be taught to bring ropes' (and I should regard the original scheme by which Laon and Laone were made brother and sister merely as a puerility), yet the hold on reality, both in human nature at large and in the sense of the action of life, is of the feeble and tenuous sort that belongs to the fiction of the opening of the century, which gave to Shelley his idea of how and from what materials to construct a tale. Though he uses the Spenserian stanza, and read Spenser continuously while eomposing, it is only the land of pseudo-romance and not Faeryland that he enters; and, as he is dealing with political and social actualities, one cannot but be aware of an unreality in the movement of the poem, which Spenser himself did not escape when he touched historic ground. Not only the first Canto, in fact, is allegorical; the whole tale is essentially allegory, and the sole realities in it are moral realities, of which the invincible power of love, its rightful sovereignty and final victory, is the chief, shown also in reverse as the futility of force in all its forms, tyranny, law, custom, fraud, or crime. The characters are not much more vital than the fable is real, with the exception of Laon, who is a reincarnation of the youth in ALASTOR (or Shelley's spirit) touched more with mortal passion and involved in human events; Laone is the double of Laon, set forth somewhat as the spirit of the vision in ALASTOR, but made more actual through the facts of living; the hermit is the wise old man; the tyrant is the King of QUEEN MAB (a stage tyrant if ever there was one), and the child is merely a property and has no value except for sentimental effect. There are longueurs in the poem, and some of the causes of them are contained in these con siderations. A moral allegory with but one lesson, and that a lesson in revolution-mak ing, would require great powers of verisimili tude, of invention and of attraction, to main. tain interest through twelve Cantos, and these qualities THE REVOLT OF ISLAM does not porsess. The analysis of its construction, in story, incident and character, brings out its least favorable points; it has, taken in the mass, great excellences, especially power of description (both of scene and action) which in the best portions can only be described as splendor of description; it has also moral elevation, and enthusiasm inexhaustible in spontaneity and glow; and in several of the episodes there is a noble dignity of style. It is, it seems to me, the most uneven, the least completely one, of Shelley's works; but if on the one hand it has affinities with the crudity of his prose fiction, it also approaches on the other the visions of the PROMETHEUS UNBOUND; and it contains the moral truth that burnt in his own heart. Page 47. An alexandrine. Rossetti points out three: IV. xxvii. 5; VIII. xxvii. 3; IX. xxxvi. 5. 48. Dedication. The motto is from Chapman's Byron's Conspiracy, III. i. (end). 49. To Mary. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Shelley's second wife. Stanza ii. 2. See Head-note for the circumstances here put into verse. iii. 3 hour, the passage is regarded as autobiographical, and faithfully represents the atmosphere of Shelley's school-days, and his own attitude toward the tyranny' he then encountered. Cf. HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY, V. v. 9 thirst, the mood depicted in ALASTOR. vi. 3 despair, referring to the year before he met with Mary. vii. 5 burst, referring to the elopement of Mary with him, in disregard of his marriage with Harriet. x. 4 referring to his fears of approaching death. 9 Cf. THE SUNSET, 4. xii. 3 One, Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and many other works, marked by independence and strength of mind, while her Letters to Imlay show deep feeling. A knowledge of her life is indispensable to a true understanding of Mary's union with Shelley. 9 Sire, William Godwin, author of Political Justice and many other radical works and novels, from whom Shelley derived in youth much of his revolutionary principles and social views. xiii. 1 One voice, the voice of Truth. xiv. 4 his pure name, Shelley means any phi-❘ lanthropist. Page 52. Canto I. vi. 8. The image may be from The Ancient Mariner, pt. iii.: but effects of sunset on the sea are frequent in the early poems and are reminiscences of Shelley's life on the west coast. Cf. below I. xv. 2 and QUEEN MAB. ii. 4; also, of the moon, PRINCE ATHANASE, II. 96. I. xxiii. 1. Cf. ALASTOR, 299, note. I. xxv. 5. The myth here invented by Shelley to typify the conflict of the principles of Good and Evil as shown in man's social progress is the most imaginative and elaborate presentation of this ancient idea in modern literature. The identification of the Morning Star, changed into the snake, with the Spirit of Good, and of the Ruling Power with Evil, a not unparalleled reversal of Christian symbolism, anticipates the conception of the relation of Good and Evil in PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. I. xxxvii. 7. Cf. ALASTOR, 129. The moods of ALASTOR frequently recur in the poem: e. g., below, xliii., xlv., lvii.; II. x., xi. ; IV. xxx. ; VI. xxviii. I. lii. Cf. QUEEN MAB, ii. 22 et seq. Canto II. The opening stanzas of the Second Canto are characteristic of Shelley's autobiographical idealizations of his youth. Cf. the Dedicatory Stanzas above and the HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY. II. xxxvi. 4 half of humankind, women. III. xxvii. 7 old man, the idealized figure of Dr. Lind, who also appears in PRINCE ATHA NASE. V. xlix. 5 three shapes, the Giant' is Equality, the Woman' is Love, the third Image is Wisdom. Cf. below, stanza iii. 1, 2. The following Hymn is to be regarded as the earliest of Shelley's greater odes, and is the highest lyrical expression that his political and social theories by themselves ever reached. VII. xxxii. 6. The reference is to Pythagoras. VIII. v. et seq. The speech of Laone is the most compact and full statement of Shelley's moral ideas in the time intermediate between QUEEN MAB and PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, with both of which poems it may be closely compared; especially the opening passage with QUEEN MAB, VII.; stanzas xi.-xii. with PROMETHEUS UNBOUND, IV. 554-578; and the whole with the same, III. iii. 130–204. IX. xxi.-xxv. An anticipation of the ODE TO THE WEST WIND. IX. xxxvi. 5. A translation of the famous epigram of Plato. X. xviii. 5 creaked. Cf. Coleridge, This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison, 74 Flew creeking, with note: Some months after I had written this line, it gave me pleasure to observe that Bartram had observed the same circumstance of the Savanna crane. "When these birds move their wings in flight, their strokes are slow, moderate and regular, and even when at a considerable distance or high above us, we plainly hear the quill feathers: their shafts and webs upon one another creek as the joints or working of a vessel in a tempestuous sea. XII. ix. 1. The situation is parallel to that in Miss Owenson's Missionary (see ALASTOR, 400, note). Hilarion, the priest-lover of Luxima, has been condemned by the Inquisition at Goa and stands at the pile to be burnt. The story continues: In this awful interval, while the presiding officers of death were preparing to bind their victim to the stake, a form scarcely human, darting with the velocity of lightning through the multitude, reached the foot of the pile, and stood before it in a grand and aspir ing attitude; the deep red flame of the slowly kindling fire shone through a transparent dra pery which flowed in loose folds from the bosom of the seeming vision, and tinged with golden hues those long dishevelled tresses, which streamed like the rays of a meteor on the air; thus bright and aërial as it stood, it looked like a spirit sent from heaven in the awful moment of dissolution to cheer and to convey to the regions of the blessed, the soul which would soon arise pure from the ordeal of earthly suffering. 'The sudden appearance of the singular phantom struck the imagination of the credulous and awed multitude with superstitious wonder.. Luxima, whose eyes and hands had been hitherto raised to heaven, while she murmured the Gayatra, pronounced by the Indian women before their voluntary immolation, now looked wildly round her, and catching a glimpse of the Missionary's figure, through the waving of the flames, behind which he struggled in the hands of his guards, she shrieked, and in a voice scarcely human, exclaimed, "My beloved, I come! Brahma receive and eternally unite our spirits!" She sprang upon the pile.' The Missionary, ch. xvii. pp. 259, 260. The scene closes with a rising of the people, and the escape of the lovers. Page 136. ROSALIND AND HELEN. This, the least significant of Shelley's longer poems, was little valued by himself. It is intended as a plea in behalf of natural love against conventions, and shows how experience of life might reconcile two friends who had been parted because one of them had sinned against convention. It contains Shelley's characteristic prepossessions, such as the story of Fenici, the incident of brother and sister parted at the altar, and the cruelty of the husband's last will, and also his characteristic idealizations in the two stages of Lionel's life, the first in health another Laon, and the second in illness with traces of the ALASTOR type; the moral sentimentality of Lionel's power over the base and wicked and the delineations of febrile passion in one whose spirit only seems vital, are familiar from preceding work; in the nature description there is nothing novel. Line 229. Rossetti points out the inconsistency of this with line 488. Line 272. Rossetti points out the inconsistency of this with line 406. Lines 405-410. The passage is defective, and unintelligible. Forman suggests while for which and had for and. Rossetti refers to Peacock's MS. letter to Ollier noting the imperfection in the proof. Line 764. The poem appears to be a personal lyric of Shelley's. Line 894. Cf. To WILLIAM SHELLEY, 1818. Line 1208. Forman conjectures which for whilst and omits had in the next line. The meaning is obvious, and its plainness is little helped by the change. Page 151. JULIAN AND MADDALO. The poem is the first in this style of verse, which Shelley made his own by the singular felicity of its combination of metrical beauty with familiar diction and tone, and it stands by itself by virtue of the fact that his other work of this sort ia fragmentary. The monologue of the madman gives evidence of dramatic power, and the power of description is matured. For the rest, the poem is most remarkable for the deeply felt pathetic sentiment, the bitterness of suffering in the wounded feelings, which pervades the madman's words. Mrs. Shelley's account of where the poem was written is interesting: 'I Capuccini was a villa built on the site of a Capuchin convent, demolished when the French suppressed religious houses; it was situated on the very overhanging brow of a low hill at the foot of a range of higher ones. The house was cheerful and pleasant; a vine-trellised walk, a pergola as it is called in Italian, led from the hall door to a summer-house at the end of the garden, which Shelley made his study, and in which he began the PROMETHEUS; and here also, as he mentions in a letter, he wrote JULIAN AND MADDALO; a slight ravine, with a road in its depth, divided the garden from the hill, on which stood the ruins of the ancient castle of Este, whose dark massive wall gave forth an echo, and from whose ruined crevices owls and bats flitted forth at night, as the crescent moon sunk behind the black and heavy battlements. We looked from the gar den over the wide plain of Lombardy, bounded to the west by the far Apennines, while to the east the horizon was lost in misty distance. After the picturesque but limited view of mountain, ravine, and chestnut wood at the Baths of Lucca, there was something infinitely gratifying to the eye in the wide range of prospect commanded by our new abode.' Line 1. Shelley describes his rides with Byron in a letter to Mrs. Shelley, August 23, 1818: 'He [Byron] took me in his gondola across the laguna to a long sandy island, which defends Venice from the Adriatic. When we disembarked, we found his horses waiting for us, and we rode along the sands of the sea, talking. Our conversation consisted in histories of his wounded feelings, and questions as to my affairs, and great professions of friendship and regard for me. He said that if he had been in England at the time of the Chancery affair, he would have moved heaven and earth to have prevented such a decision. We talked of literary matters, his Fourth Canto [Childe Harold], which he says is very good, and indeed he repeated some stanzas of great energy to me.' Line 40 poets, Milton, Paradise Lost, ii. 559. Line 99. The madhouse is on San Servolo, but Rossetti quotes Browning to the effect that the building described by Shelley was the penitentiary on San Clemente. Rossetti declines to decide the point. Line 143 child, Allegra. Page 160. PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. This poem, as a lyrical drama dealing with the myth of Prometheus, has for its principal poetic source the Prometheus of Eschylus. Shelley wrote, It has no resemblance to the Greek drama. It is original;' and essentially, the i statement is true. The relation of Prometheus to Jupiter, as a sufferer under tyranny because of his love of mankind, the scene of his torture on the mountain side over the sea, the attendance of sea nymphs in the chorus, the herald Mercury, the vulture, and the insistence on the violent elements of nature, earthquake, lightning and whirlwind, in the imagery, are common to both poems; but Shelley by his treatment has so modified all these as to recreate them. The ethical motive of Shelley, his allegorical meanings, his metaphysical suggestions, the development of the old and introduction of new characters, the conduct of the action, the interludes of pastoral, music and landscape, the use of new imaginary beings neither human nor divine, and the conception of universal nature, totally transform the primitive Eschylean myth; and in its place arises the most modern poem of the century by virtue of its being the climax of the Revolution, in imaginative literature, devoted to the ideal of democracy as a moral force. The crude Eschylean matter may be easily traced in the following notes in detail. The interpretation of the modern poem more difficult, and may be studied in the essays of Rossetti in the Shelley Society Publications, Todhunter's A Study of Shelley, Thomson's Notes, in the Athenæum, 1881, and Miss Scudder's Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, as well as in numerous biographies and essays. I am unable to follow these commentators in giving more precise meaning to the characters and the plot than is contained in Shelley's and Mrs. Shelley's exposition already cited in the Head-note to the poem, and the preface, supplemented by the statements of the text itself. Prometheus may be the Human Mind,' Ione Hope and Panthea Faith, and the Semichoruses of Act II. sc. ii. may represent respectively the passage of Love and Faith [Àsia and Panthea] through the sphere of the Senses of the Emotions of the Reason and Will, and so on; but that Shelley had any conscious logic of this sort in his poem seems too uncertain to be asserted. The drama is an emanation of his imagination, working out his deepest sentiments and convictions in a form nearer to the power of music than language ever before achieved; it is haunted by the presence of the inexpressible in the heart of its most transcendent imagery; and in all its moods and motions is far from the domain in which the prose of articulated thought is discerned through a veil of figured phrase. The intellectual skeleton, in any case, even were it discoverable, is not the soul of the poem. Certain theories of Shelley, as to philosophical problems, are present in the verse; but they control only instinctively, and not by deliberate thought, the structure of character, scene, event, and act. They are noted below. Page 165. Dramatis Persona. Prometheus, the Titan, bound to the icy precipice, suffers this punishment from Jupiter as a consequence of the gift of fire and other benefits to mankind. Jupiter is the supreme of living things,' of whom Prometheus says, 'I gave all he has,' and O'er all things but thyself I gave thee power, and my own will.' Prometheus possesses the secret which may transfer the sceptre of wide heaven' from Jupiter, and refuses to divulge it. The knowledge that the reign of Jupiter will end sustains him in his torture, which has now lasted for many centuries. Asia, a sea nymph, daughter of Oceanus, is the beloved of Prometheus, and separated from him in India. Panthea is the messenger between the two; Ione is her companion; both are sisters of Asia. Demogorgon is the child of Jupiter who overthrows his father, at the appointed time, as Jupiter had dethroned Saturn; the foreknowledge of this is the secret of Prometheus. The other persons of the drama have little or no part in the action, and are easily comprehended. The obvious allegorical meaning of these greater characters can be briefly stated. Prometheus is a type of mankind suffering under the oppression of the evil of the world. Jupiter is this incarnate tyranny conceived primarily in a broadly political rather than in any moral sense, the one name of many shapes' already described in THE REVOLT OF ISLAM. Asia is, in Mrs. Shelley's words, the same as Venus and Nature,' or essentially the Aphrodite of Lucretius humanized by Shelley's imagination and recreated as the life of nature animated by the spirit of love. The separation of Prometheus from Asia during the reign of Jupiter typifies the discordance between man and nature due to the tyranny of convention, custom, institutions, laws, and all the arbitrary organization of society, one of the cardinal ideas inherited by Shelley from eighteenth century thought. The fall of Jupiter, which is the abolition of human law, is followed by the triumph of love, in which man and nature are once more in accord; this accord is presented doubly in the drama as the marriage of Prometheus, and the regeneration of the world in millennial happiness. For the interpretation of Demogorgon, Panthea, and the various spirits, see below. The references to Eschylus are to Paley's third edition, London, 1870. Page 165. Act I. Scene i. The landscape setting of the Act is Eschylean, and borrows some details from the Greek, but as mountain scenery it is Alpine and directly studied from nature. Shelley's Journal, March 26, 1818, gives a special instance of it, describing Les Echelles: "The rocks, which cannot be less than a thousand feet in perpendicular height, sometimes overhang the road on each side, and almost shut out the sky. The scene is like that described in the Prometheus of Eschylus: vast rifts and caverns in the granite precipices; wintry mountains with ice and snow above; the loud sounds of unseen waters within the caverns, and walls of toppling rocks, only to be scaled as he describes, by the winged chariot of the ocean nymphs.' I. 2 One, Prometheus. I. 23. Cf. Eschylus, 98-100. I. 58. The pity of Prometheus for Jupiter and his wish to recall the curse formerly pronounced mark the moral transformation of the character from that conceived by Eschylus. This is the point of departure from the ancient myth, which is here left behind. Shelley thus clothes Prometheus with the same ideal previously depicted in Laon, - the spiritual power of high-minded and forgiving endurance of wrong, the opposition of love to force, the victory of the higher nature of man in its own occult and inherent right. It appears to me that this perfecting of Prometheus through suffering, so that he lays aside his hate of Jupiter for pity, shown in his repentance for the curse and his withdrawal of it, is the initial point of the action of the drama and marks the appointed time for the overthrow of the tyrant. The fulfilment of the moral ideal in Prometheus is the true cause of the end of the reign of evil, though this is dramatically brought about by the instrumentality of Demogorgon. In this opening speech, and in the remainder of the drama, it is unnecessary to point out the echoes of English poets. It is enough to observe generally, once for all, that Milton and Shakespeare have displaced Wordsworth and Coleridge as sources of phrase and tone, though they have not entirely excluded them, especially the latter; just as Plato has displaced Godwin and the eighteenth century philosophers in the intellectual sphere, though here again without entirely excluding them. I. 74. The dramatic choruses constructed of responding voices, both in Shelley and in Byron, go back to the witch choruses of Macbeth; but they may be more immediately derived from Coleridge's Fire, Famine, and Slaughter. I. 132 whisper, the inorganic voice' of the earth. I. 137 And love, i. e., dost love (Swinburne). Forman conjectures I love; Rossetti, and Jove. I. 140. Cf. Eschylus, 321. I. 150 tongue, the earth has apparently two voices, that of the dialogue and the ‘inorganic voice' above, which is the same as the language of the dead' above (cf. I. 183) and the tongue known only to those who die' in this line. I. 165 et seq. Cf. Eschylus, 1064-1070, for parallel imagery; but the passage recalls especially the sorrow of Demeter after the rape of Persephone and the woes then visited on the earth in the classic myth. I. 192 et seq. Zoroaster. The story is not known to Zoroastrian literature. The conception of the double world of shades and forms, with the reunion of the two after death, seems original with Shelley, suggested by the notion of Plato's world of ideas. I. 262 et seq. Cf. Eschylus, 1010-1017. I. 289 robe. The reference is to the shirt of Nessus. I. 296. Cf. Eschylus, 936-940. I. 328. The detail is borrowed from the action of Apollo in Eschylus, Eumenides, 170. The character of Mercury is developed by including in his mood the pity shown by Hyphæstos in the PROMETHEUS. The Furies are in character, description, and language, Shelley's creation. 1. 345. The reference is to Dante, Inferno, ix. I. 416. Cf. Eschylus, 774-779. I. 451. The idea is Platonic, and frequent in Shelley. Cf.. below, II. iv. 83 and PRINCE ATHANASE, II. 2. I. 458. Cf. Eschylus, 218; THE REVOLT OF ISLAM, VIII. ix.-x., xxi. I. 471. The ethical doctrine that each sin brings its own penalty of necessity, and essentially is its own punishment, is involved in the image that the Furies are shapeless in themselves. I. 484. The intimacy of remorse in the soul is partly indicated by the expressions used. The nature of the suffering brought by sin is most truly conceived and presented in what the Furies say of themselves throughout the scene. The idea, however, is confused by the addition of the element of the evil nature active within the soul and assailing it. The two notions are not incompatible, but the second has little pertinence to Prometheus here. I. 490. The case illustrated, for example, in Tennyson's Lucretius. I. 547. The torture of Prometheus, as was indicated by the speeches of the Furies, ceases to be physically rendered, and becomes mental. He is shown two visions of the defeat of good, first the Crucifixion, second, the French Revolution; the lesson the Furies draw is the folly of Prometheus in having opened the higher life for man, since it entails the greater misery the more he aspires, and is doomed at each supreme effort to increase rather than alleviate the state of man (cf. I. 595-597). The torture inflicted by the Furies, as well as the description of their methods in the abstract just commented on, gives an ethical reality to them which takes them out of the morals of the ancient world and transforms them into true shapes of modern imagination. I. 592. Cf. Eschylus, 710-712. I. 619-632. The state of mankind, as Shelley saw it, described in cold, blunt, hard terms, is the climax and summary of the torture Prometheus suffers at the last moment; but his preference to feel such pain rather than be dull to it, and his continuance in faith that it shall end, combined with his lack of hatred or desire for vengeance, signalizes his perfection of soul under experience. I. 641. Cf. Eschylus, 772. |