" Prometheus Unbound 7 7 AN ESSAY BY W. B.
YEATS.
T.
WHEN I was a young man I. wrote two essays calling Shelley's dominant symbol the Morning Star, his poetry the poetry of desire. I had meant to explain Prometheus Unbound, but some passing difficulty turned inc from a task that began to seem impossible. What does Shelley mean by Demo-gorgon ? It lives in the centre of the earth, the sphere of Parmenides, perhaps, in a darkness that sends forth "rays of gloom" as "light from the meridian sun " ; it names itself "eternity.' When it has succeeded Jupiter, "the supreme of living things," as he did Saturn, when he and it have gone to lie "henceforth in darkness," Prometheus is set free, nature purified. Shelley the political revolutionary expected miracle, the Kingdom of God in the twinkling of an eye like some Christian of the first century. He had accepted Berkeley's philosophy as expounded in Sir William Drunamond's Academical Questions. The ultimate reality is not thought, for thought cannot create, but "can only perceive" ; the created world is a stream of images- in the human mind, the stream and cavern of his symbolism ; this stream is Time. Eternity is the abyss which receives and creates. Sometimes the soul is a boat, and in this boat Asia sails against the current from age to youth, from youth to infancy, and so to the pre-natal condition "Peopled by shapes too bright to see." In the fourth act this condition, man's first happiness and his last, sings its ecstatic song ; and yet although the first and last it is always near at hand, " Tir n'an og is not far from any of you," as a country-woman said to ine
"That garden sweet, that lady fair, And all sweet shapes and odours there, In truth, have never passed away ; 'Tis we ; 'tis ours are changed ; not they."
Why then does Demo-gorgon, whose task is beneficent, who lies in wait behind "The mighty portal . . . whence the oracular vapour is hurled up which lonely men drink wandering in their youth," bear so terrible a shape, and not to the eyes of Jupiter, external necessity, alone, but to those of Asia, who is identical with the Venus-Urania of the Athanais. Why is Shelley terrified of the Last Day like a Victorian child ? It was not terrible to Blake, "For the cherub with the flaming sword is hereby com- manded to leave his guard at the Tree of Life ; and when he doesthe whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt."
Demo-gorgon made his plot incoherent, its interpreta- tion impossible, it was thrust there by that something which again and again forced him to balance the object of desire conceived as miraculous and superhuman, with nightmare. Shelley told his friends of attempts upon his life or his liberty, elaborating details between delusion and deceit, believed himself infected with elephantiasis because he had sat opposite a fat woman in an omnibus, encountered terrifying apparitions, one a woman with eyes in her breasts ; nor did his friendships escape obsession, his admired Elizabeth Hutchinson became "the brown demon . . . an artful, superficial, ugly, hermaphro- ditical beast of a wonian " ; nbr Was Prometheus the only nightmare-ridden work ; there is nothing hi Swell- foot the Tyrant but the cold rhetoric of obsession; The Cenci for all its magnificent construction is made unendurable upon the stage by an artificial character, the scapegoat of his unconscious hatred. When somebody asked Aubrey Beardsley towards the end of his life why he secreted indecencies in odd corners of his designs, more than once necessitating the destruction of a plate, he answered " Soniething compels me to sacrifice to Priapus." Shelley, whose art is allied to that of the Salome drawings where sex is sublimated to an unearthly receptivity, though more ardent and positive, imagined under a like compulsion whatever seemed dark, destructive, indefinite. Blake, though he had his brown demons, kept his freedom in essentials ; he had encountered with what seemed his physical eyes but one nightmare "scaly, speckled, very awful" and thought such could visit but seldom imaginative men.
Shelley was not a mystic, his system of thought was constructed by his logical faculty to satisfy desire, not a symbolical revelation received after the suspension of all desire. He could neither say with Dante " Thy will is my peace," nor with Finn in the Irish story "the best music is what happens."
There is a form of meditation which permits an image or symbol to generate itself, and the images and symbols so generated build themselves up into coherent structures often beautiful and startling. When a young man I made an exhaustive study of this condition in myself and in others, choosing as a rule for the initiatory symbol a name or form associated with a Cabbalistic Sephiroth, or with one of the five traditional elements. Sometimes, though not in my own case, trance intervened and the structure attained a seeming physical solidity, this how- ever seldom happened and was considered undesirable. Almost always, after some days or weeks of meditation, a form emerged in sleep or amid the ordinary affairs of life to show or speak some significant message, or at some moment a strange hidden will controlled the unconscious movements of the body. If the experimentalist had an impassioned purpose, some propaganda, let us say, and no critical sense, he might become obsessed by images, voices, that had, it seemed, for their sole object to guard his purpose or to express its contrary and threaten it. The mystic, upon the other hand, is in no such danger, he so lives whether in east or west whether he be Ramakrishna or Boehnie, as to dedicate his initiatory image, and its generated images, not to his own but the Divine Purpose, and after certain years attains the Saints' miraculous life. There have been others unfitted for such a life by nature or station, who could yet dedicate their actions and acquire what William Morris has called lucky eyes ; "all that he does unwitting he does well." There is much curious evidence to show that the Divine Purpose so invoked descends into the mind at moments of inspiration, not as spiritual life alone but as what seems a physical bright- ness. Perhaps' ei-erybody that 'pursues that life Tor however short a time, even, as it were, but touches it; experiences now and again during sleep bright coherent dreams where something is shown or spoken that grows in meaning with the passage of time. Blake spoke of this 'Stronger and better light," called its source "the human form divine," Shelley's "harmonious soul of many a soul," or, as we might say, the Divine Purpose. The stationary, joyous energy of certain among his figures, "Christ Blessing" for instance, or of his own life when we regard it as a whole as contrasted with the sad- ness and disquiet of Shelley's, suggests radiating light. We understand why the first Christian painters encircled certain heads with light. Because this source or purpose is always an action, never a system of thought, its man can attend, as Shelley could not, to the whole drama of life, simplicities, banalities, intoxications, even lie upon his left side and eat dung, set free "from a multitude of opinions."
It was as a mystic that Blake wrote "Sweet joy befall thee," "Soft deceit and idleness," "The Holy Word walks among the ancient trees." Shelley's art shows that he was an unconverted man though certainly a visionary, what people call a " psychic " ; his landscapes are vaporised and generalized by his purpose, his spirits have not the separated existence even of those that in "Manfred " curse and yet have " sweet and melancholy" voices. He was the tyrant of his own being, nor was it in all likelihood a part of the plan that it should find free- dom, seeing that he worked as did Keats and Marlowe, uncorrecting and unhesitating, as though he knew the shortness of his life. That life, and all lives, would be unintelligible to me did I not think of them as an exfolia- tion prolonged from life to life ; he sang of something beginning.
IV.
When I was in my early twenties Shelley was much talked about, London had its important "Shelley Society," The Cenci had been performed and forbidden, provincial sketching clubs displayed pictures by young women of the burning of Shelley's body. The orthodox religion, as our mothers had taught it, was no longer credible, those who could not substitute Connoisseurship, or some humanitarian or scientific pursuit found a substi- tute in Shelley. He had shared our curiosities, our political problems, our conviction that despite all experience to the contrary, love is enough ; and unlike Blake, isolated by an arbitrary symbolism, he seemed to sum up all that was metaphysical in English poetry. When in middle life I looked back I found that he and not Blake, whom I had studied more and with more approval, had shaped my life, and when I thought of the tumultuous and often tragic lives of friends or acquaintance I attributed to his direct or indirect influence their Jacobin frenzies, their brown demons.
V.
Another study of that time, less general, more confined to exceptional men, was that of Balzac as a social philo- sopher. When I was thirteen or fourteen I heard some- body say that he changed men's lives, nor can I think it a coincidence that an epoch founded in such thought as Shelley's ended with an art of solidity and complexity. Me at any rate he saved from the pursuit of a beauty that seeming at once absolute and external requires, to strike a balance, hatred as absolute. Yet Balzac is no complete solution for that can be found in religion alone. One of the sensations of my childhood was a description of a now lost design of Nettleship's, God creating Evil, a vast terrifying face, a woman and a tiger rising from the fore- head. Why did it seem so blasphemous and so profound ? It was many years before I understood that we must not demand even the welfare of the human race, nor traffic with divinity in our prayers. Divinity moves outside our antinomies, it may be our lot to worship in terror ; "Did He who made the lamb make thee ?
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