effort to escape from the known to the unknown? One never knows exactly where one is in any of his longer poems. Is there one of them except The Cenci and Charles the First which has a recognizable scene of action? Who can say where he is in Alastor or The Witch of Atlas, or even in Hellas? How many, too, of his lyrics have their action in the air, or in some world of spirits more ethereal and immaterial even than air itself? It is notable that his greatest nature poems are addressed to a wind and a cloud, and that when he addresses an ode to a bird it is not to the nightingale but to that bird of the air whom he expressly calls the Skylark. So the Prometheus story would attract him as giving him another way of escape, such as he had always loved, from the inhabited earth to the regions of cloud and air.

Then another thing that would be congenial to him is the method of travel which the personages of the Prometheus Vinctus employ. The Nymphs come to Prometheus in a winged car, and they actually remain suspended in this airy car somehow till line 280, when at the request of Prometheus they descend to earth' with light foot stepping forth from their wind-precipitate chair, and quitting the air, the pure moving-place of the birds'. As they do so their father Ocean arrives, he too in airy fashion riding upon a winged beast. And even Io, though she does not fly, is hardly a walker on the common road of earth: for she is always leaping (σkipta) under the attacks of the gadfly, and has been, and is to be, a wanderer by mysterious ways to unknown places. What can be more like Shelley's people, so many of whom, not only his Hours and Asia and Panthea here, but his Witch and his Laon and Cythna, travel on their strange journeys in similar airy fashion?

Then, again, of all Greek plays, except perhaps the Bacchae, the Prometheus is, I suppose, the fullest of Nature. And of Shelley's nature, the nature which 'man did not make and cannot mar'. Those famous first words of Prometheus,

& Sios alonp, 'O divine air and swift-winged breezes, O fountains of streams and innumerable smiles of the waves of the sea, O Mother Earth, and all-seeing Sun' carry us at once to the world in which Shelley was most at home. While Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson amaze and delight us by their knowledge of the actual surface of the earth on which we live, Shelley is seldom content to leave us there: he hurries us away to the heights and spaces of heaven, to this very dios aionp, where we find it so hard to breathe, or else to those 'sacred spaces of the sea', so immeasurable and so empty, which another great poet, disciple at once of Aeschylus and of Shelley, has made the last word of one of his greatest lyrics.

The Prometheus Vinctus is, in fact, like nearly all the poems of Shelley, neither particular, nor local, nor national, nor even earthly, as all the other dramas of Aeschylus are: it is rather, what Shelley loved to be, cosmic and universal.

And there is one other attraction which it must have had for him; it is political and theological and occasionally almost religious. Prometheus is a sort of saviour of mankind he represents love as opposed to hatred, liberty as opposed to tyranny, hope substituted for fear, all the arts and abundances of life taking the place of ignorance, poverty, pain and misery. Is not that exactly what Shelley was always trying himself to be, what he was always picturing in the heroes of his poems? There was, in fact, everything in Prometheus to attract him. The eager utilitarian that he was would delight in the useful arts which the hero had given to men, the revolutionary republican would joyfully catch up the denunciations of the tyranny of Zeus, the moralist would join in hatred of its cruelty, the prophet in prophesying its doom.

There are all these ways, then, in which the Prometheus Vinctus would inevitably be congenial to Shelley. And, indeed, his drama is founded on that of Aeschylus. It, too,

has divine personages, a remote and mysterious scene of action, a conflict between a hero and a tyrant, a political and religious revolution of which the most elemental and tremendous powers of nature are, as it were, the spectators and assessors. Yet how unlike the two are! And does not most of the unlikeness come from the lack in Shelley of the definite, the concrete and the human, of the preponderance in him of spirit over body, of the ideal over the real? There are obscurities in the story of Aeschylus in the story of Shelley there is almost nothing else. How shadowy his characters are beside those of Aeschylus? How inhumanly thin they are to us who ask for something of which our senses can take hold! Supernatural personages have seldom proved easy passengers for poetry to carry. In Homer, Virgil, and Milton they are seldom impressive and often a stumbling-block: for where there is omnipotence there cannot be any real conflict. But, in the Prometheus of Aeschylus, not only is Zeus not omnipotent, as the prophecy of his fall shows-and in Shelley's play, of course, his actual fall— but he is not a mere devil, as Shelley makes him, nor is Prometheus a pure saint like Shelley's hero. The Zeus of Aeschylus is only partly the tyrant of heaven: he is partly also the Highest God whom the pious Nymphs, the friends of Prometheus, honour and revere. So all the minor personages are humanized in a way of which Shelley had not the secret. There is more of human nature in the opening scene between Kratos and Hephaestus than in all the Prometheus Unbound. There are no recognizable qualities in Panthea, Ione, or Asia: they are all a mist of ideal love and beauty. But how well Aeschylus has distinguished Hephaestus from Kratos, the daughters of Ocean from Ocean himself. The daughters exhibit none of the blind 'heroics' of Shelley's nymphs: they are timid, prudent, and occasionally critical. But their sympathy is genuine and can show its reality by its courage at the

dangerous moment. Their father Ocean, on the other hand, is an elderly coward who merely wishes to make a respectable appearance. The Force' of Aeschylus makes on us an impression of enjoying the business of bullying Prometheus which Shelley's far more abstract Furies only occasionally convey and sometimes contradict. The physical tortures inflicted on Prometheus in the Vinctus are only too real to us and man will have to make a great spiritual advance before a related account of the injustices of the world, which is the torture inflicted by Shelley's Furies, will seem equally real or likely to cause suffering nearly so acute. Even Io, horned as she is and so tediously geographical, is quite as interesting as Asia and her sisters, though immeasurably less beautiful. Our difficulty about Shelley's figures is their lack of solidity: we cannot see them. Io is, after all, a woman who has had tremendous adventures. Asia is only a spirit who has had dreams.

But of course the principal contrast between the two poets is provided by Prometheus himself. Aeschylus had not been content to reproduce the story as he found it. He had got rid of the childish and unworthy tricks (like the cheating of Zeus in the sacrifice) which deformed the early legend of Prometheus. Primitive peoples, as we see in the story of Jacob and Esau, do not mind their heroes being credited with shabby tricks of this sort. But Aeschylus had got past that stage. His Prometheus is a figure of high moral nobility who could not stoop to employ any petty arts in his sublime war with the tyrant. But, heroic as he is, he is still human. Aeschylus has turned the trickster of the legend into a prophet of justice and a saviour of mankind, but he has not moralized him out of human recognition. His Prometheus has a very human hatred of his enemies, a strong man's impatience with weakness, a free man's scorn of slaves. He conceals neither the pain he suffers nor the desire of revenge with which it fills him.

But Shelley has carried the process of moralization so far as to substitute perfection for sublimity, and the gains of ethics are often the losses of art. Art is humanity, and humanity and perfection are terms which never meet. The whole of Shelley's drama, and not least the character of Prometheus, demands for its right appreciation a highly spiritualized being at his most intellectual and spiritual moment the reader is never given a rest, never a chance of sinking back on his five senses all the ordinary levels of his mind and character are utterly ignored, left far below, outsoared' as Shelley himself would say. But only a very few of us climb these heights often or can remain long on them and poetry, which demands our weakness as well as our strength, loses by confining its appeal to so rare and elect a company. Every one can understand and be moved by the Prometheus of Aeschylus many men who have both brains and imagination are rather exhausted than interested by Shelley's Prometheus. The difference between them is partly the difference between the Satan and the Almighty Father and Son of Paradise Lost. Milton could not give these last, and Shelley would not give his Prometheus, what Satan and the Prometheus of Aeschylus have in such magnificent abundance:

the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome.

And every one feels, with or without shame, with or without a thought of 'Blessed are the meek', that, as we are at present, these are qualities which, in art, certainly interest us, and possibly attract us, far more than the abstract perfection with which Shelley loved to endow his characters. The truth is, as Aristotle knew, that absolute perfection is not dramatic material. In the Prometheus, in the Oedipus, and even in the Antigone, there is some admixture of