320
Kansas University Weekly.
drawn by the echoes, start upon a journey which finally brings them to the dark abode of Demogorgon. This vehement action of the chorus characters makes possible the great variety of verse forms as the emotions of the characters vary from love to hate and joy and pity and hope and exhilaration.
Shelley's poem has the modern divisions into acts and scenes but the great lyrical parts also mark very distinct divisions in the development of the drama. The scene changes ten times during the progress of the play. The drama of Aeschylus conforms to the regular Greek type except that there is no prologue.
Coming now to the materials which enter into the two dramas, we find that Shelley has used a much larger number of characters than Aeschylus and has in every way made his drama more complex. In Shelley too, even those characters which bear similar names to the characters in Aeschylus, do not represent the same moral qualities. Aeschylus dealt with characters which to the Greek people at least were real while Shelley's characters are mere abstractions clothed in the old mythologic nomenclature. Shelley has in fact created a new myth by making ancient symbols stand for the modern conceptions generated by the French Revolution. This point will be more fully considered when we come to discuss the moral problem as it appeared to the two poets.
A striking difference is seen in the way the two poets deal with Nature. Aeschylus looks upon Nature as dead and insensate. He has not the modern romantic conception of Nature as animated and in sympathetic relation with Man. Indeed, none of the Greeks had this conception. Though the Hellenes believed themselves autochthonous they seemed to have gotten rather far from the maternal bosom. Though they peopleled the haunts of Nature with innumerable divinities of divers orders, yet they did not spiritualize Nature herself. Gods presided over Nature and were in certain natural objects yet Nature as a whole was not spiritually conceived. Shelley upon the other hand was Nature's darling child. He dwelt very near to Nature's
heart and had a nature most delicately attuned to the harmonies heard in her spacious auditorium. As we learn from "Adonais," he was pantheistic in his conception of the world. Hence the use made by him of Nature in "Prometheus Unbound." The Earth and the spirits of Nature are represented as sympathizing with Prometheus and as trying to strengthen him in his contest with Jupiter. All such conceptions are absent from Aeschylus.
Another noticeable difference is the absence of color in "Prometheus Bound" and its superabundance in "Prometheus Unbound." The former preserves a dull sombre tone throughout while the latter glows and blushes with color. Yet Shelley has not thrown in these colors merely to beautify and enliven. They serve to unify the drama. There is a gradual and definite progress in the introduction of the color-lights. As the pathway of the just "shineth more and more even unto the perfect day" so the lights in this poem increase in brilliancy through all the degrees from blackness and darkness relieved only by the sheen of "moon-freezing crystals" up to the full blaze of celestial light at the transfiguration of Asia.
But it is when we take a general view of the two dramas in respect of the moral problem, that their greatest difference appears. In order to grasp this contrast it is necessary to distinguish carefully, the ideas for which the principal characters stand in the two poems. Prometheus, the central figure, is represented by both dramatists as in antagonism with Jupiter, the ruling power; but while Aeschylus conceives the antagonism as a real one between two actual forces, Shelley represents it as a conflict between one entity—the human mind—and its own shadow. In Aeschylus Zeus represents the supreme authority of the universe while Prometheus is a symbol of the finite will in rebellion against the Law. To Shelley, upon the other hand, Jupiter is the personification of custom—the crystallization of early ages of human thought which humanity has outgrown and which it struggles to throw off. Man's emancipation from these fetters, according to Shelly,