On the 12th of March, 1818, Shelley quitted England, never to return.
His principal motive was the hope that his health would be improved by
a milder climate; he suffered very much during the winter previous to
his emigration, and this decided his vacillating purpose. In December,
1817, he had written from Marlow to a friend, saying:
'My health has been materially worse. My feelings at intervals are of
a deadly and torpid kind, or awakened to such a state of unnatural and
keen excitement that, only to instance the organ of sight, I find the
very blades of grass and the boughs of distant trees present
themselves to me with microscopic distinctness. Towards evening I sink
into a state of lethargy and inanimation, and often remain for hours
on the sofa between sleep and waking, a prey to the most painful
irritability of thought. Such, with little intermission, is my
condition. The hours devoted to study are selected with vigilant
caution from among these periods of endurance. It is not for this that
I think of travelling to Italy, even if I knew that Italy would
relieve me. But I have experienced a decisive pulmonary attack; and
although at present it has passed away without any considerable
vestige of its existence, yet this symptom sufficiently shows the true
nature of my disease to be consumptive. It is to my advantage that
this malady is in its nature slow, and, if one is sufficiently alive
to its advances, is susceptible of cure from a warm climate. In the
event of its assuming any decided shape, IT WOULD BE MY DUTY to go to
Italy without delay. It is not mere health, but life, that I should
seek, and that not for my own sake--I feel I am capable of trampling
on all such weakness; but for the sake of those to whom my life may be
a source of happiness, utility, security, and honour, and to some of
whom my death might be all that is the reverse.'
In almost every respect his journey to Italy was advantageous. He left
behind friends to whom he was attached; but cares of a thousand kinds,
many springing from his lavish generosity, crowded round him in his
native country, and, except the society of one or two friends, he had
no compensation. The climate caused him to consume half his existence
in helpless suffering. His dearest pleasure, the free enjoyment of the
scenes of Nature, was marred by the same circumstance.
He went direct to Italy, avoiding even Paris, and did not make any
pause till he arrived at Milan. The first aspect of Italy enchanted
Shelley; it seemed a garden of delight placed beneath a clearer and
brighter heaven than any he had lived under before. He wrote long
descriptive letters during the first year of his residence in Italy,
which, as compositions, are the most beautiful in the world, and show
how truly he appreciated and studied the wonders of Nature and Art in
that divine land.
The poetical spirit within him speedily revived with all the power and
with more than all the beauty of his first attempts. He meditated
three subjects as the groundwork for lyrical dramas. One was the story
of Tasso; of this a slight fragment of a song of Tasso remains. The
other was one founded on the Book of Job, which he never abandoned in
idea, but of which no trace remains among his papers. The third was
the "Prometheus Unbound". The Greek tragedians were now his most
familiar companions in his wanderings, and the sublime majesty of
Aeschylus filled him with wonder and delight. The father of Greek
tragedy does not possess the pathos of Sophocles, nor the variety and
tenderness of Euripides; the interest on which he founds his dramas is
often elevated above human vicissitudes into the mighty passions and
throes of gods and demi-gods: such fascinated the abstract imagination
of Shelley.
We spent a month at Milan, visiting the Lake of Como during that
interval. Thence we passed in succession to Pisa, Leghorn, the Baths
of Lucca, Venice, Este, Rome, Naples, and back again to Rome, whither
we returned early in March, 1819. During all this time Shelley
meditated the subject of his drama, and wrote portions of it. Other
poems were composed during this interval, and while at the Bagni di
Lucca he translated Plato's "Symposium". But, though he diversified
his studies, his thoughts centred in the Prometheus. At last, when at
Rome, during a bright and beautiful Spring, he gave up his whole time
to the composition. The spot selected for his study was, as he
mentions in his preface, the mountainous ruins of the Baths of
Caracalla. These are little known to the ordinary visitor at Rome. He
describes them in a letter, with that poetry and delicacy and truth of
description which render his narrated impressions of scenery of
unequalled beauty and interest.
At first he completed the drama in three acts. It was not till several
months after, when at Florence, that he conceived that a fourth act, a
sort of hymn of rejoicing in the fulfilment of the prophecies with
regard to Prometheus, ought to be added to complete the composition.
The prominent feature 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. This also forms a portion of
Christianity: God made earth and man perfect, till he, by his fall,
'Brought death into the world and all our woe.'
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. And the subject he
loved best to dwell on was the image of One warring with the Evil
Principle, oppressed not only by it, but by all--even the good, who
were deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity; a
victim full of fortitude and hope and the spirit of triumph emanating
from a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of Good. Such he had
depicted in his last poem, when he made Laon the enemy and the victim
of tyrants. He now took a more idealized image of the same subject. He
followed certain classical authorities in figuring Saturn as the good
principle, Jupiter the usurping evil one, and Prometheus as the
regenerator, who, unable to bring mankind back to primitive innocence,
used knowledge as a weapon to defeat evil, by leading mankind, beyond
the state wherein they are sinless through ignorance, to that in which
they are virtuous through wisdom. Jupiter punished the temerity of the
Titan by chaining him to a rock of Caucasus, and causing a vulture to
devour his still-renewed heart. There was a prophecy afloat in heaven
portending the fall of Jove, the secret of averting which was known
only to Prometheus; and the god offered freedom from torture on
condition of its being communicated to him. According to the
mythological story, this referred to the offspring of Thetis, who was
destined to be greater than his father. Prometheus at last bought
pardon for his crime of enriching mankind with his gifts, by revealing
the prophecy. Hercules killed the vulture, and set him free; and
Thetis was married to Peleus, the father of Achilles.
Shelley adapted the catastrophe of this story to his peculiar views.
The son greater than his father, born of the nuptials of Jupiter and
Thetis, was to dethrone Evil, and bring back a happier reign than that
of Saturn. Prometheus defies the power of his enemy, and endures
centuries of torture; till the hour arrives when Jove, blind to the
real event, but darkly guessing that some great good to himself will
flow, espouses Thetis. At the moment, the Primal Power of the world
drives him from his usurped throne, and Strength, in the person of
Hercules, liberates Humanity, typified in Prometheus, from the
tortures generated by evil done or suffered. 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, the emblem of the human race, in
perfect and happy union. In the Fourth Act, the Poet gives further
scope to 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; while his fair and
weaker companion and attendant, the Spirit of the Moon, receives bliss
from the annihilation of Evil in the superior sphere.
Shelley develops, more particularly in the lyrics of this drama, his
abstruse and imaginative theories with regard to the Creation. It
requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as his own to understand the
mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem. They elude the ordinary
reader by their abstraction and delicacy of distinction, but they are
far from vague. It was his design to write prose metaphysical essays
on the nature of Man, which would have served to explain much of what
is obscure in his poetry; a few scattered fragments of observations
and remarks alone remain. He considered these philosophical views of
Mind and Nature to be instinct with the intensest spirit of poetry.
More popular poets clothe the ideal with familiar and sensible
imagery. Shelley loved to idealize the real--to gift the mechanism of
the material universe with a soul and a voice, and to bestow such also
on the most delicate and abstract emotions and thoughts of the mind.
Sophocles was his great master in this species of imagery.
I find in one of his manuscript books some remarks on a line in the
"Oedipus Tyrannus", which show at once the critical subtlety of
Shelley's mind, and explain his apprehension of those 'minute and
remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or
the living beings which surround us,' which he pronounces, in the
letter quoted in the note to the "Revolt of Islam", to comprehend all
that is sublime in man.
'In the Greek Shakespeare, Sophocles, we find the image,
Pollas d' odous elthonta phrontidos planois:
a line of almost unfathomable depth of poetry; yet how simple are the
images in which it is arrayed!
"Coming to many ways in the wanderings of careful thought."
If the words odous and planois had not been used, the line might have
been explained in a metaphorical instead of an absolute sense, as we
say "WAYS and means," and "wanderings" for error and confusion. But
they meant literally paths or roads, such as we tread with our feet;
and wanderings, such as a man makes when he loses himself in a desert,
or roams from city to city--as Oedipus, the speaker of this verse, was
destined to wander, blind and asking charity. What a picture does this
line suggest of the mind as a wilderness of intricate paths, wide as
the universe, which is here made its symbol; a world within a world
which he who seeks some knowledge with respect to what he ought to do
searches throughout, as he would search the external universe for some
valued thing which was hidden from him upon its surface.'
In reading Shelley's poetry, we often find similar verses, resembling,
but not imitating the Greek in this species of imagery; for, though he
adopted the style, he gifted it with that originality of form and
colouring which sprung from his own genius.
In the "Prometheus Unbound", Shelley fulfils the promise quoted from a
letter in the Note on the "Revolt of Islam". (While correcting the
proof-sheets of that poem, it struck me that the poet had indulged in
an exaggerated view of the evils of restored despotism; which, however
injurious and degrading, were less openly sanguinary than the triumph
of anarchy, such as it appeared in France at the close of the last
century. But at this time a book, "Scenes of Spanish Life", translated
by Lieutenant Crawford from the German of Dr. Huber, of Rostock, fell
into my hands. The account of the triumph of the priests and the
serviles, after the French invasion of Spain in 1823, bears a strong
and frightful resemblance to some of the descriptions of the massacre
of the patriots in the "Revolt of Islam".) The tone of the composition
is calmer and more majestic, the poetry more perfect as a whole, and
the imagination displayed at once more pleasingly beautiful and more
varied and daring. The description of the Hours, as they are seen in
the cave of Demogorgon, is an instance of this--it fills the mind as
the most charming picture--we long to see an artist at work to bring
to our view the
'cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds
Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands
A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.
Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,
And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:
Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink
With eager lips the wind of their own speed,
As if the thing they loved fled on before,
And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks
Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all
Sweep onward.'
Through the whole poem there reigns a sort of calm and holy spirit of
love; it soothes the tortured, and is hope to the expectant, till the
prophecy is fulfilled, and Love, untainted by any evil, becomes the
law of the world.
England had been rendered a painful residence to Shelley, as much by
the sort of persecution with which in those days all men of liberal
opinions were visited, and by the injustice he had lately endured in
the Court of Chancery, as by the symptoms of disease which made him
regard a visit to Italy as necessary to prolong his life. An exile,
and strongly impressed with the feeling that the majority of his
countrymen regarded him with sentiments of aversion such as his own
heart could experience towards none, he sheltered himself from such
disgusting and painful thoughts in the calm retreats of poetry, and
built up a world of his own--with the more pleasure, since he hoped to
induce some one or two to believe that the earth might become such,
did mankind themselves consent. The charm of the Roman climate helped
to clothe his thoughts in greater beauty than they had ever worn
before. And, as he wandered among the ruins made one with Nature in
their decay, or gazed on the Praxitelean shapes that throng the
Vatican, the Capitol, and the palaces of Rome, his soul imbibed forms
of loveliness which became a portion of itself. There are many
passages in the "Prometheus" which show the intense delight he
received from such studies, and give back the impression with a beauty
of poetical description peculiarly his own. He felt this, as a poet
must feel when he satisfies himself by the result of his labours; and
he wrote from Rome, 'My "Prometheus Unbound" is just finished, and in
a month or two I shall send it. It is a drama, with characters and
mechanism of a kind yet unattempted; and I think the execution is
better than any of my former attempts.'
I may mention, for the information of the more critical reader, that
the verbal alterations in this edition of "Prometheus" are made from a
list of errata written by Shelley himself.
