Shelley

  "To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
   To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
     To defy Power which seems omnipotent;
   To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
   From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
     Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
   This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
   Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
   This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory."

On the whole, Prometheus has been over-praised, perhaps because the beauty of the interspersed songs has dazzled the critics. Not only are the personages too transparently allegorical, but the allegory is insipid; especially tactless is the treatment of the marriage between Prometheus, the Spirit of Humanity, and Asia, the Spirit of Nature, as a romantic love affair. When, in the last of his more important poems, Shelley returned to the struggle between the good and evil principles, it was in a different Spirit. The short drama of 'Hellas' (1821) was "a mere improvise," the boiling over of his sympathy with the Greeks, who were in revolt against the Turks. He wove into it, with all possible heightening of poetic imagery, the chief events of the period of revolution through which southern Europe was then passing, so that it differs from the Prometheus in having historical facts as ostensible subject.

Through it reverberates the dissolution of kingdoms in feats of arms by land and sea from Persia to Morocco, and these cataclysms, though suggestive of something that transcends any human warfare, are yet not completely pinnacled in "the intense inane." But this is not the only merit of "Hellas;' its poetry is purer than that of the earlier work, because Shelley no longer takes sides so violently. He has lost the cruder optimism of the 'Prometheus', and is thrown back for consolation upon something that moves us more than any prospect of a heaven realised on earth by abolishing kings and priests. When the chorus of captive Greek women, who provide the lyrical setting, sing round the couch of the sleeping sultan, we are aware of an ineffable hope at the heart of their strain of melancholy pity; and so again when their burthen becomes the transience of all things human. The sultan, too, feels that Islam is doomed, and, as messenger after messenger announces the success of the rebels, his fatalism expresses itself as the growing perception that all this blood and all these tears are but phantoms that come and go, bubbles on the sea of eternity. This again is the purport of the talk of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who evokes for him a vision of Mahmud II capturing Constantinople. The sultan is puzzled:

  "What meanest thou? Thy words stream like a tempest
   Of dazzling mist within my brain";

but 'we' know that the substance behind the mist is Shelley's "immaterial philosophy," the doctrine that nothing is real except the one eternal Mind. Ever louder and more confident sounds this note, until it drowns even the cries of victory when the tide of battle turns in favour of the Turks. The chorus, lamenting antiphonally the destruction of liberty, are interrupted by repeated howls of savage triumph: "Kill! crush! despoil! Let not a Greek escape'" But these discords are gradually resolved, through exquisitely complicated cadences, into the golden and equable flow of the concluding song:

  "The world's great age begins anew,
     The golden years return,
   The earth doth like a snake renew
     Her winter weeds outworn:
   Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
   Like wrecks of a dissolving dream."

Breezy confidence has given place to a poignant mood of disillusionment.

  "Oh, cease! must hate and death return?
     Cease! must men kill and die?
   Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
     Of bitter prophecy.
   The world is weary of the past,
   Oh, might it die or rest at last!"

Perhaps the perfect beauty of Greek civilisation shall never be restored; but the wisdom of its thinkers and the creations of its artists are immortal, while the fabric of the world

  "Is but a vision;--all that it inherits
   Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams."

It is curious that for three of his more considerable works Shelley should have chosen the form of drama, since the last thing one would say of him is that he had the dramatic talent. 'Prometheus' and 'Hellas', however, are dramas only in name; there is no thought in them of scenic representation. 'The Cenci' (1819), on the other hand, is a real play; in writing it he had the stage in view, and even a particular actress, Miss O'Neil. It thus stands alone among his works, unless we put beside it the fragment of a projected play about Charles I (1822), a theme which, with its crowd of historical figures, was ill-suited to his powers. And not only is 'The Cenci' a play; it is the most successful attempt since the seventeenth century at a kind of writing, tragedy in the grand style, over which all our poets, from Addison to Swinburne, have more or less come to grief. Its subject is the fate of Beatrice Cenci, the daughter of a noble Roman house, who in 1599 was executed with her stepmother and brother for the murder of her father. The wicked father, more intensely wicked for his grey hairs and his immense ability, whose wealth had purchased from the Pope impunity for a long succession of crimes, hated his children, and drove them to frenzy by his relentless cruelty. When to insults and oppression he added the horrors of an incestuous passion for his daughter, the cup overflowed, and Beatrice, faced with shame more intolerable than death, preferred parricide.

Here was a subject made to Shelley's hand--a naturally pure and gentle soul soiled, driven to violence, and finally extinguished, by unnameable wrong, while all authority, both human and divine, is on the side of the persecutor. Haunted by the grave, sad eyes of Guido Reni's picture of Beatrice, so that the very streets of Rome seemed to echo her name--though it was only old women calling out "rags" ('cenci')--he was tempted from his airy flights to throw himself for once into the portrayal of reality. There was no need now to dip "his pen in earthquake and eclipse"; clothed in plain and natural language, the action unfolded itself in a crescendo of horror; but from the ease with which he wrote--it cost him relatively the least time and pains of all his works--it would be rash to infer that he could have constructed an equally good tragedy on any other subject than the injured Beatrice and the combination, which Count Francesco Cenci is, of paternal power with the extreme limit of human iniquity.

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