Shall reach when his eyes have been closed. He wots of; only the thoughts, Raised by the objects he passes are his.” * Our business is with man as he now is; and the assumptions required by us to lead our life now with a noble courage, rather than be led by it, we assuredly should not be so fanatically agnostic as not to venture! Let the future deal with our assumptions as it will and must. Our truth concerns us. The truth for the future concerns the future. If I can live by "the things I see," and find in them an efficient cause for my becoming my best self, it is well. If not, I must, I ought, I will live by "Faith"-that is, confidence in some undemonstrable proposition, some working hypothesis. Pessimism, if partial and genuine, is an evil that cures itself. The present is always of authority. That section of the race which really thinks life not worth living will die out in the end, its opinions being an evidence of its unfitness to survive. Only what is vital, furthers growth, and hastens eventual fruition of holiness, loveliness, and bliss can in the long run. by living men be held true. The Future, p. 288. IV. THE PROMETHEUS UNBOUND OF SHELLEY-A DRAMA OF HUMAN DESTINY. 1. SHELLEY, REBEL AND REFormer. "Unless wariness is used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life blood of a master spirit, embalmed or treasured on purpose to a life beyond life."* Such words are never too familiar. They always bear rereading. It can hardly be impertinent to quote them at the beginning of any critical essay dealing with a veritable work of art. They may serve to tune the writer's thought, to give him the right pitch of reverence, to make him remember the humbleness of his function-a mere roadside sign-post to urge on weary or perplexed wayfarers to conquer the distance between themselves and what is beautiful, nobly true, and purely good. With what authority, too, do they not come from such a stern prophet of righteousness, the master-singer of Samson Agonistes, himself the blind old giant crushed in the fall of the Philistine temple-roof? The writer of this paper does not covet the name of critic. What, critic? A critic with a theoretic * J. Milton's Areopagitica. measuring rod, declaring by how many inches or feet the Apollo Belvedere is shorter than, say, his ideal kilted highlander! A critic? Busy comparing incomparables, and able in the end to furnish us little more than a substantiation of his own perverse ingenuity? Nor can there be much gained by the historicocritical method, so-called. After you have given me all the biographic gossip imaginable, how am I nearer an understanding of the finished work of art? Does it help me to be shown how Faust, for instance, was made—piecemeal—and thus to have dispelled forever the illusion of organic unity which certainly it was the constant object of the artist to produce? You may tell me much of the man, but I fancy of his work-which is in all probability greater, wiser, and better than he-of the honey the bees of God stored up in the dead lion's skull-you will not say much (if you follow out this historical method) that will help me to a more loving appreciation. It seems to me(and why, pray, should one avoid the honest pronoun in the first person singular? should not every one speak for himself?)—a work of art ought to be treated with the same courtesy we accord to a living man. We do not venture to put him on the rack, much less to vivisect him, with a view to obtaining a more intimate acquaintance. We simply let him affect us. If he draws out love, then we are willing to love him, and are sure that time will confound his detractors. What a blessing it is we know nothing of Homer, next to nothing of Shakespeare, and so very little of Dante Alighieri! We are able to read their works, to see them as they were meant to be seen, as independent creatures endowed with a spirit that utters itself through them. What imminent danger are we not threatened with, of quite losing our Faust in anecdotes and detailed reconstructions from data more or less accurate and significant? And is it not just possible that our morbid curiosity, our ill-mannered peering into the privacies of Shelley's career, may incapacitate us for experiencing that shock every inspired work is intended to give; for receiving his prophetic message, because, forsooth, we fancy his life was not up to his doctrine? And who, pray, will be the loser, Shelley or posterity? He has done his work. We have ours to do. Our possible depreciation of him, is simply our own impoverishment since resulting in a lessened receptivity on our part for his inspiring message, conveyed through self-subsisting works of beauty. Optimist, by an inner ineradicable conviction, he sought all the time to construct with his acute powers of reasoning a speculative system that should accord with it, that should promise mankind salvation from all social evils. A rebel, of course, he had to be, for those in power believe that all is well, and the privileged classes are not eager to extend their privileges till they shall become universal rights. Like all rebels, he gloried in persecution, and tended at first to imagine that the world is divided into two hostile camps-angels and devils, reformers and their disciples, the foes of reform and their victims. Any thing good or bad that tends to preserve the false equilibrium of compromise is detested. No wonder the established religion came in for its share of hatred. Only by degrees could Shelley transfer his hatred from the religion of the Christ to what the average Englishman had made of it; only after a while was he enabled to draw effectually that distinction, which changes a zealous iconoclast into a constructive reformer, and which already appears in his preface to the Revolt of Islam: "The erroneous and degrading idea which men have conceived of a Supreme Being, for instance, is spoken against, but not the Supreme Being itself." It is not by any means. easy, in the heat of conflict or of debate, to speak enthusiastically of what after all is only a possibility, and ill, at the very same time, of its actual corruption which is sorely felt, and which in the minds of the multitude is perpetually mistaken for that good thing itself. So it happens that men of one mind appear to contradict one another because of their opposite use of terms. The one praises an institution, having in mind the ideal it should express; the other, out of love for the same ideal, assails it, because it so poorly serves its purpose. Some men pass from the negative to the positive camp of reformers, and always, of course, without changing belief, though their creed (that is to say, the verbal expression of their belief) has undergone a total change. So the inspired boy of Queen Mab became the inspired youth of Laon and Cythna, and in due time the inspired man of Prometheus Unbound. 2. THE PROMETHEUS UNBOUND. One grows sufficiently weary, when assured of the inspiration of a work of art by the only possible credential-its power to inspire-when, therefore, certain of the spiritual mission of Shelley-to have constantly set before one a huge "but" in the shape |