Part 7

When first the gods their fatal strife began, And insurrection raged in heaven, some striving To cast old Kronos from his heavy throne That Jove might reign, and others to crush i' the bud His swelling mastery--I wise counsel gave To the Titans, sons of primal Heaven and Earth; But gave in vain. Thus baffled in my plans, I deemed it best, As things then were, leagued with my mother Themis, To accept Jove's proffered friendship. By my counsels. From his primeval throne was Kronos hurled Into the pit Tartarean, dark, profound, With all his troop of friends.

Soon as he sat on his ancestral throne He called the gods together, and assigned To each his fair allotment and his sphere Of sway; but, ah! for wretched man! To him no portion fell: Jove vowed To blot his memory from the Earth, and mould The race anew. I only of the gods Thwarted his will; and, but for my strong aid, Hades had whelmed, and hopeless ruin swamped All men that breathe. Such were my crimes:

* * * * *

And here I lie, in cunning torment stretched, A spectacle inglorious to Jove.

Presently Ocean appears, and advises Prometheus to yield. Prometheus scornfully refuses, and Ocean, fearful of being found in bad company, prudently retires, whereupon, after a mournful hymn from the chorus, reciting the sympathy of all nations and things with Prometheus, he proceeds to relate in detail his ministry in behalf of mankind. The account which he gives of the primal condition of the human race is very instructive upon our present research, as embodying, or rather as unconsciously revealing, the complete unconsciousness of personality--of what we call personality--among Aeschylus and his contemporaries.

Prometheus begins by calling the whole human race at that time a babe, and goes on to declare that

... Having eyes to see, they saw not, And hearing, heard not, but, like dreaming phantoms, A random life they led from year to year, All blindly floundering on. No craft they knew --to build-- But in the dark earth burrowed.... Numbers too I taught them ... and how To fix their shifting thoughts by marshalled signs.

He brings the ox, the ass, and the horse into service, launches the first boat on the sea, teaches medicine, institutes divination, and finally

... I probed the earth To yield its hidden wealth ... Iron, copper, silver, gold; ... And thus, with one short word to sum the tale, Prometheus taught all arts to mortal men.

CHORUS.

Do good to men, but do it with discretion. Why shouldst thou harm thyself? Good hope I nurse To see thee soon from these harsh chains unbound, As free, as mighty, as great Jove himself.

PROMETHEUS.

This may not be; the destined curse of things Fate must accomplish.... Though art be strong, necessity is stronger.

CHORUS.

And who is lord of strong necessity?

PROMETHEUS.

The triform Fates and the sure-memoried Furies.

CHORUS.

And mighty Jove himself must yield to them?

PROMETHEUS.

No more than others Jove can 'scape his doom.

CHORUS.

* * * * * There's some dread mystery in thy speech Close-veiled.

PROMETHEUS.

* * * * The truth thou'lt know In fitting season; now it lies concealed In deepest darkness; for relenting Jove Himself must woo this secret from my breast.

(This secret--so it is told in the old myths--is that Jove is to meet his own downfall through an unfortunate marriage, and Prometheus is in possession of the details which would enable Jove to avoid the doom.)

After a choral hymn, recommending submission to Jove, we have suddenly the grotesque apparition of Io upon the stage. Io had been beloved by Jove; but the jealousy of Hera, or Juno, had transformed her into a cow, and had doomed her to wander over the world stung by an inexpugnable gadfly, and watched by the hundred-eyed Argus. Thus, suddenly, upon the spectacle of a man suffering from the hatred of Jove, Aeschylus brings the spectacle of a woman suffering from the love of Jove. Io enters with this fine outburst:

What land is this? What race of mortals Owns this desert? Who art thou, Rock-bound with these wintry fetters, And for what crime tortured thus? Worn and weary with far travel, Tell me where my feet have borne me! O pain! pain! pain! it stings and goads me again, The fateful gadfly!--save me, O Earth!--avaunt, Thou horrible shadow of the earth-born Argus! Could not the grave close up thy hundred eyes, But thou must come, Haunting my path with thy suspicious look, Unhoused from Hades? Avaunt! avaunt! why wilt thou hound my track, The famished wanderer on the waste sea-shore?

After much talk, Io now relates her mournful story, and, supported by the Chorus, persuades Prometheus to prophesy the very eventful future which awaits her when her wanderings are over. In this prophetic account of her travels, Aeschylus gives a soul-expanding review of land after land according to the geographic and ethnic notions of his time; and here Mr. Blackie, whose translation of the Prometheus I have been partly quoting from, sometimes reproduces his author in very large and musical measures. For example, Prometheus chants:

When thou hast crossed the narrow stream that parts The continents, to the far flame-faced East Thou shalt proceed, the highway of the sun; Then cross the sounding ocean, till thou reach Cisthene and the Gorgon plains, where dwell Phorcys' three daughters, maids with frosty eld, White as the swan, with one eye and one tooth Shared by the three; them Phoebus, beamy-bright Beholds not, nor the nightly moon. Near them Their winged sisters dwell, the Gorgons dire, Man-hating monsters, snaky-locked, whom eye Of mortal ne'er might look upon and live. * * * * One more sight remains That fills the eye with horror. * * * The sharp-beaked Griffins, hounds of Jove, avoid, Fell dogs that bark not; and the one-eyed host Of Arimaspian horsemen with swift hoofs Beating the banks of golden-rolling Pluto. A distant land, a swarthy people next Receives thee: near the fountains of the sun They dwell by Ethiop's wave. This river trace Until thy weary feet shall reach the pass Whence from the Bybline heights the sacred Nile Pours his salubrious flood. The winding wave Thence to triangled Egypt guides thee, where A distant home awaits thee, fated mother Of an unstoried race.

In this strain Prometheus continues to foretell the adventures of Io until her son Epaphus, monarch of Egypt, is born, who will be--through the fifty daughters celebrated in _The Suppliants_ of Aeschylus--the ancestor of Hercules, which Hercules is to be the deliverer of Prometheus himself.

Then in a frenzy of pain, Io departs, while the Chorus bursts into a hymn deploring such ill-matched unions as that of Io with Jove, and extolling marriage between equals.

After the exit of Io--to finish our summary of the play--the action hastens to the end; the chorus implores Prometheus to submit: presently, Hermes or Mercury appears, and tauntingly counsels surrender, only to be as tauntingly repulsed by Prometheus; and, after a sharp passage of wits between these two, accompanied by indignant outbursts from the Chorus at the pitilessness of Hermes, the play ceases with a speech from Prometheus describing the new punishment of Jove:

Now in deed and not in discourse, The firm earth quakes. Deep and loud the ambient thunder Bellows, and the flaring lightning Wreathes his fiery curls around me And the whirlwind rolls his dust, And the winds from rival regions Rush in elemental strife, And the sky is destroyed with the sea. Surely now the tyrant gathers All his hoarded wrath to whelm me. Mighty Mother, worshipped Themis, Circling Aether that diffusest Light, the common joy of all, Thou beholdest these my wrongs!

Thus in the crash of elements the play ends. Fortunately our purpose with this huge old story thus treated by Aeschylus, lays us under no necessity to involve ourselves in endless discussions of the Sun-myths, of the connection between ox-horned Io and the sacred Egyptian cow Isis; of moral interpretations which vary with every standpoint. The extent to which these _do_ vary is amusingly illustrated in an interpretation of the true significance of Prometheus, which I recently happened to light upon, made by a certain Mr. Newton, who published an elaborate work a few years ago in defence of the strictly vegetable diet. Mr. Newton would not have us misapply fire to cookery; and in this line of thought he interprets the old fable that Prometheus stole fire from heaven and was punished by being chained to Caucasus with a vulture to gnaw his liver. The simple fact, says our vegetarian, is that "Prometheus first taught the use of animal food, and of fire with which to render it more pleasing, etc., to the taste. Jupiter, and the rest of the gods, foreseeing the consequences of the inventions" (these consequences being all manner of gastric and other diseases which Newton attributes to the use of animal food), "were amused or irritated at the short-sighted devices of the ... creature, and left him to experience the sad effects of them." In short, the chaining to a rock, with a vulture to gnaw his liver, is simply a very satisfactory symbol for dyspepsia.

Untroubled by these entanglements, which thus reach from Max Muller, with his Sun-wanderings, to the dyspeptic theory of our vegetarian; our present concern is less with what Aeschylus or his fable meant than with the frame of mind of the average man who sat in his audience, and who listened to these matters with favor, who accepted this picture of gods and men without rebellion. My argument is, that if this average man's sense of personality had not been most feeble he could _not_ have accepted this picture at all. Permit me, then, to specify three or four of the larger features of it before we go on to contrast the treatment of this fable by Aeschylus with that by Shelley and Taylor in a later age.

In the first place, then, since we are mainly meditating upon the growth of human personality, I beg you to observe the complete lack of all provision for such growth, either among the gods or the men of this presentation. Consider Hephaestus, for example, or Vulcan. Vulcan may hammer away, immortal as he is, for a million aeons upon the thunderbolts of Jove; he may fashion and forge until he has exhausted the whole science and art of offensive and defensive armament; but how much better off is Vulcan for that? he can never step upon a higher plane,--he is to all eternity simply Vulcan, armorer to Jove. And so Hermes or Mercury may carry messages eternally, but no more; his faculty and apparatus go to that end and no farther. But these limitations are intolerable to the modern personality. The very conception of personality seems to me to imply a conception of growth. If I do one thing to-day, another to-morrow, I am twice as much to-morrow as I was to-day, by virtue of the new thing; or, even if I do only the same thing to-morrow that I did to-day, I do it easier,--that is, with a less expenditure of force, which leaves me a little surplus; and by as much as this surplus (which I can apply to something else), I am more than I was yesterday. This "more" represents the growth which I said was implied in the very conception of personality, of the continuous individual.

Now the feeling of all this appears to be just as completely asleep in Aeschylus himself and in all his precedent old Greek theogonists as it is in the most witless boor who gazes open-mouthed at the gigantic Prometheus. But if we here descend from the gods, to the men, of this picture, we find Prometheus almost in terms asserting this absence of personality among the men whom he taught which we have just found by implication among the gods who tortured him.

You will remember the lines I read from the first long speech of Prometheus, in which he describes the utterly brutish, crawling cave-dwellers to whom he communicated the first idea of every useful art. The denial of all power in man himself, once he was created, of originating these inventions--that is, of growing--that is, of personality--is complete.

I find nothing so subtly and inconsolably mournful among all the explicit miseries of the Greek mythology as this fixity of nature in the god or the man, by which the being is suspended, as it were, at a certain point of growth, there to hang forever. And in this view the whole multitudinous people, divine and human, of the whole Greek cyclics, seem to me as if sculptured in a half relief upon the black marble wall of their fate--in half relief because but half gods and half men, who in the lack of personality cannot grow, cannot move.

When Keats stands regarding the figures sculptured upon the Grecian urn, it is only a cunning sign of the unspeakable misery of his own life that he finds the youth happy because though he can never succeed in his chase he can never fall any farther behind in it; to Keats' teased aspiration a certain sense of rest comes out of the very fixity of a man suspended in marble.

"Fair youth beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss Though winning near the goal! Yet do not grieve: She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss, Forever wilt thou love and she be fair."

A true old Greek despair fills these lines with a sorrow which is all the more penetrating when we hear it surging out from among the keen and energetic personalities of modern times,--personalities which will not accept any youth's happiness of being howsoever near to his love if that happiness be coupled with the condition that he is never to be nearer,--personalities which find their whole summary in continuous growth, increase, movement.

And if we remember that even when the condition of primal man is very far from the miserable state depicted by Prometheus, the case grows all the stronger of that Golden Age in which the antique imagination took great delight, not all unshared, it must be confessed, by later times, fails to please the modern personality. For example in Chaucer's poem called _Aetas Prima_, that is, the first or Golden Age, we have the most engaging picture of man in a pre-Promethean time, drawn at a far different point of view from that of Prometheus in our play.

How taking seems this simplicity:

"A blisful lyfe, a peseable and so swete, Leddyn the peplis in the former age; Thei helde them paied with the frutes they ete, Wich that the feldes gafe them by usage;

Thei etyn most hawys and such pownage And dronken watyr of the colde welle.

Yet was the ground not woundyd with the plough, But corne upsprange onsowe of mannes hand;

No man yit knew the furous of hys land: No man yit fier owt of the flynt fand.

No flesche ne wyst offence of hegge or spere; No coyne ne knew man whiche was false or trewe: No shyppe yit karfe the wawys grene and blewe: No marchand yit ne fet owtlandische ware.

Yit were no palys chambris, ne no hallys; In cavys and in wodes soft and swete Sleptyn thys blessyd folk withowte wallys On grasse or levys in parfite joy and quiete.

Unforgyd was the hauberke and the plate; The lambisshe pepyl, voyd of alle vice, Hadden noo fantasye to debate, But eche of hem wold oder well cheriche: No pride, none envy, none avarice, No lord, no taylage by no tyrannye, Humblesse, and pease, good fayth the emprise.

Yit was not Jupiter the likerous, That first was fadyr of delicacye Come in thys world, ne Nembroth desirous To raygne hadde not made hys towrys hyghe. Alas! alas! now may men weep and crye, For in owre days is is not but covetyse, Doublenesse, treson, and envye, Poysonne, manslawtyr, mordre in sondri wyse."

Surely this is all soothing and enchanting enough; one cannot escape the amiable complacencies which breathe out from this placid scene; but what modern man would soberly agree to exchange a single moment of this keen, breezy, energetic, growing existence of ours for a Methusaleh's life in this golden land where nature does not offer enough resistance to educe manhood or to furnish material for art, and where there is absolutely no room, no chance, no need, no conception of this personality that if rightly felt makes the humblest life one long enchantment of the possible. The modern personality confronted with these pictures, after the first glamour is gone, is much minded to say, with the sharp-witted Glaucon, in Plato's _Republic_, according to Jowett: "after all, a state of simplicity is a city of pigs."

But secondly, the cumbrous apparatus of power with which Aeschylus presents us in this play is a conception of people not acquainted with that model of infinite compactness which every man finds in his own _ego_. Jove, instead of speaking a word and instantly seeing the deed result, must rely first upon his two ministers, Might and Force, who in the first scene of our play have hauled in the Titan Prometheus; these, however, do not suffice, but Hephaestus must be summoned in order to nail him to the rocks; and Jove cannot even learn whether or not his prisoner is repentant until Hermes, the messenger, visits Prometheus and returns. The modern _ego_ which, though one indivisible, impalpable unit, yet remembers, reasons, imagines, loves, hates, fears and does a thousand more things all within its little scope, without appliances or external apparatus--such an _ego_ regards such a Jove much in the light of that old Spanish monarch in whose court various duties were so minutely distributed and punctiliously discharged, that upon a certain occasion (as is related), the monarch being seated too near the fire, and the proper functionary for removing him being out of call, his majesty was roasted to death in the presence of the entire royal household.

And as the third feature of the unpersonality revealed in this play, consider the fact that it is impossible for the modern reader to find himself at all properly terror-stricken by the purely physical paraphernalia of thunder, of storms, of chains, of sharp bolts, and the like, which constitute the whole resources of Jove for the punishment of Prometheus.

The modern direct way of looking at things--the perfectly natural outcome of habit of every man's dealing with a thing for himself and of first necessarily looking to see what the thing actually is--this directness of vision cannot help seeing that Prometheus is a god, that he is immortal, that thunder cannot kill him, that the bolt through his breast makes no wound, but will repair itself with ease, that he not only knows all this, but knows further that it is to end (as Prometheus himself declares in the play), in his own triumph. Under these circumstances the whole array of whirlwinds and lightnings become a mere pin-scratch; the whole business is a matter of that purely physical pain which every man is ashamed to make a noise of. We can conceive a mere man fronting all these terrors of storm and thunder with unbowed head and serene countenance, in the consciousness that the whitest of these lightnings cannot singe an eyelash of his immortal personality; how, then, can it be expected that we shall be greatly impressed with the endurance of these ills by a god to whose greater resistive endowment the whole system of this gross thrust-and-smite of iron and fire is no more than the momentary tease of a gnat! To the audience of Aeschylus, not so; they shiver and groan; they know not themselves.

I do not know how I can better show the grossness of this conception of pain than by opposing to it a subtile modern conception thereof whose contrast will fairly open out before us the truly prodigious gulf between the average personality of the time of Aeschylus and that of ourselves. The modern conception, I refer to is Keats' Ode on Melancholy; which, indeed, if one may say a word _obiter_, out of the fullness of one's heart--I am often inclined to think for all-in-all, that is, for thoughts most mortally compacted, for words which come forth, each trembling and giving off light like a morning-star, and for the pure beauty of the spirit and strength and height of the spirit,--which, I say, for all-in-all, I am often inclined to think, reaches the highest height yet touched in the lyric line.

ODE ON MELANCHOLY.

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine; Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd By night-shade, ruby grape of Proserpine; Make not your rosary of yew-berries, Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl A partner in your sorrow's mysteries; For shade to shade will come too drowsily, And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt-sand wave, Or in the wealth of globed peonies; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-moth sips: Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

V.

The main direction of our studies has been indicated in the preceding lectures to such an extent that from this point forward our customary review may be omitted. In examining the _Prometheus_ of Aeschylus we have found three particulars, in which not only Aeschylus, but his entire contemporary time shows complete unconsciousness of the most precious and essential belongings of personality. These particulars were, (1), the absolute impossibility of growth, implicitly affirmed of the gods and explicitly affirmed of men in the passages which were read; (2) the awkwardness of Jove's apparatus of power which included a minister for every kind of act--as contrasted with the elasticity and much-in-little which each man must perceive in regarding the action of his own mind; and (3) the gross and purely physical character of the punishments used by Jove to break the spirit of Prometheus. It was contended, you remember, that if the audience of Aeschylus had acquired that direct way of looking phenomena in the face, which is one of the incidents of our modern personality, they would have perceived such an inadequacy between the thunders and earthquakes of Jove, on the one hand, and the immortal spirit of a Titan and a god like Prometheus, on the other, that the play, instead of being a religious and impressive spectacle to them, as it doubtless was, would have been simply a matter of ridicule, or at best one of those mere _dilettante_ entertainments where of our own free will we forgive the grossest violations of common sense and propriety for the sake of the music or the scenery with which they are associated, as for example at the Italian opera, or the Christmas pantomime.

This last particular brings us directly upon Shelley's play of the _Prometheus Unbound_.