perfunctory way, in conjunction with another man, and in a manner which is not his own. Henry VIII is as much a masque as a history. It lives by the two great figuresWolsey the victim of ambition, Katharine the victim of policy, tyranny, and lust. The Reformation, which for us is the important event of the reign, is scarcely mentioned. So far as the play is Shakespeare's we may say that Shakespeare remained to the end faithful to his royal and personal conception of history. He wrote his Histories at the end of the reign of the most popular of all English sovereigns, the last of our strongest royal house. When Henry VIII was added to the series the throne was already occupied by the first of the weak family who were to lose it and leave for their successors something slowly dwindling into the Hereditary Presidency of to-day. The old royal England ends with Elizabeth, the last sovereign to be worshipped and obeyed. The English people fought and defeated the Stuarts; ignored and half despised the first Georges; hated, respected, and then pitied George III; used, reverenced, and loved, but neither feared nor in any very literal sense obeyed Queen Victoria. Shakespeare saw the great chapter of kingship as it closed; and he gave to it his gift of life. As it came from his hands it is far from being all beauty, victory or wisdom; quite the contrary; it is mainly a record of crime and folly. But he has given it his indefinable touch of greatness; and as we look back on his picture of it, we see our kings and ourselves as realities, living and sinning, plotting and fighting, suffering and dying; and we see again and again, through and behind them all, the figure of England, slowly shaping herself for our rejoicing admiration, loyalty, and love.

PROMETHEUS IN POETRY

THE story of Prometheus is the subject of dramas by three of the very greatest poets of the world, as well as by several others of humbler rank. It has also given, not its name but things much more important than a name, to two of the greatest creations of Milton. His Satan and his Samson both bear very obvious marks of the influence of the Prometheus of Aeschylus. A subject which is in itself so sublime, and has been handled by such poets as Aeschylus and Milton, Goethe and Shelley, can hardly fail to provide matter of interest, both in the way of contrast and in the way of parallel, to those who occupy themselves with the study of poetry. Art is at once discipline and freedom, acceptance and revolt, law and life. There is no life for it outside law and none that is wholly within. Artists, like the rest of us, are at once the children of necessity and the children of free will: and, as neither principle by itself expresses life, so neither by itself expresses art. The poet receives a tradition, accepts and uses it, imposes himself upon it and varies it. The drama of Shakespeare is what it is both because he sat at Marlowe's feet and because he turned his back upon Marlowe. The Faery Queen could not have been without Ariosto, but still less could it have been without Spenser. The working of this double law of acceptance and innovation is nowhere better seen than where many artists or poets deal with the same subject. The hieratic stupidity of so much Egyptian art is due to the fact that generations of artists continue to repeat every detail of a scene, like seminarists taught to say the offices or perform ceremonial acts after their masters without using their own minds at all. For centuries the same king appears

on Egyptian reliefs in exactly the same attitude punishing the same prostrate enemies in the same way. The making of such reliefs had evidently become a mere form or ritual in which the only thing that mattered was to do the thing exactly as it had always been done. But mere ceremonial conservatism is perhaps an even surer way of death for art than anarchical freedom; partly because it is so much easier to practise. The rebel in the arts is always much more traditional than he supposes. He owes much more than he knows to his predecessors; he unconsciously reproduces them much more. Whitman fancied he owed nothing to anybody; fancied he could set and was setting all the laws and traditions of poetry at defiance. But he often falls back on more or less traditional forms; and it is with the assistance of these forms, and not in naked independence of them, that his genius achieved the sublime things by which it will live. But we need not travel so far as to Whitman for the contrast to Egyptian monotony. He, like Wordsworth, was deliberately attempting new poetic subjects and for them a certain originality of manner was obvious and inevitable. The real contrast to Egypt is found in Greece or Italy: the same Centaurs and Lapiths, the same Apollos and Aphrodites, the same Nativities and Walks to Emmaus. How content the artists of Europe have been with the subjects given them by tradition! How obedient they have been, generation after generation! And yet how unhampered their freedom has been! What a free spiritual journey there is between the Apollo of Tenea and the Apollo Belvedere, between a Nativity by Raphael and one by Rembrandt, between the Supper at Emmaus as once conceived at Venice by Paul Veronese and now by Forain at Paris to-day! And of course the same counterworking of acceptance and divergence may be seen all through the history of poetry. Virgil writes an Epic obviously uniting the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer

like both and yet very unlike. Horace learns

what he has it in him to learn of Pindar, and Catullus of Sappho each adds himself to his model. The Greek tragedians handle again and again the same legends, at once following and departing from the tale that had already been so often told. Shakespeare invents no plots, nor Molière : yet who ever had a freer genius, or gave it freer play, than, in their different ways, these two?

But to come back to Prometheus. There is nowhere any better example of what I have been saying. No poetic | subject has had the consecration of so much genius. None has better exhibited the fertility and variety that may be found in a great ancient story. 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?' Abraham's question is the question asked in the Prometheus of Aeschylus, in the Prometheus of Shelley, in the book of Job. It is the question again and again suggested in the Paradise Lost. But there it is mainly the reader who asks it. In the dramas it is asked by a great rebel. And in each of them it is the rebel, not the Judge, who is the hero of the drama. At the root of each of them, and of Goethe's drama too, is the sublime conception of the passage from slavery to freedom; of the spirit which refuses any longer to remain the unquestioning slave of the caprices of a tyrant and demands to obey no power but that which is the embodiment of law and justice, that whose service is perfect freedom and the fullness of life. Milton said that the object of his epic was to justify the ways of God to men. Whether he succeeds or not is not here the point. His poem throughout asks the question which Job asks of God, which the Prometheus of Aeschylus, Goethe, and Shelley asks of Zeus. Shakespeare asks something very like it through the mouth of Lear: 'I am a man more sinn'd against than sinning.' Lear feels the need of finding a way to 'show the heavens more just'. Still with him this is only a momentary vision of the universal: once or twice, in the tremendous lightning-flashes of that awful night, he

sees not himself but the whole world. But it is only for a moment. His antagonist in the drama is not Zeus or Jehovah it is his daughters. But the war of Job and Prometheus and Satan is with none other than Omnipotence. Of all these poets the only one capable of supposing that Authority has absolutely nothing to say for itself is Shelley: though curiously enough Goethe, the man of order, is not far behind him. We do not know exactly how Aeschylus met the tremendous challenge which his Prometheus had thundered out. Probably in some fashion which would not seem satisfactory to us who have carried so much farther than he the demand for a rational and ethical theology. Shelley turned away with indignation from 'a catastrophe so feeble as a reconciliation between the champion and the oppressor of mankind'. But it was his characteristic weakness to make his Zeus the mere oppressor of mankind. The Zeus of Aeschylus is more than that. And the reconciliation of apparent opposites, so distasteful to abstract natures like Shelley's, is the law of life. It is at any rate certain that Aeschylus found some way of atonement' between his Rebel and his Omnipotent. For Milton's Rebel there could be no atonement. The interesting challenge in his poem is that of Adam, and still more that of the critical reader. And the answer they get is one of legalized tyranny tempered by love. The Divine omnipotence is partly an irresponsible Despot whose mere will must be accepted as law partly a personified Love which gives Itself to transform the Despot into a Father, the subjects into children. Like the Prometheus of the ultimate solution, Adam submits and accepts. And so, no doubt, did the critical reader of Milton's day. And so does Job, though the answer he gets is little more than a naked reassertion of Divine Omnipotence and human weakness, the only answer Dante gives to the same question. That answer is of course ultimately one of faith, the faith that a universe which will not ultimately be ex

6