Prometheus represents mankind. He is oppressed by the very being, Jupiter, to whom he himself has given power. Jupiter must not be considered as the abstract power of moral evil. He represents those institutions, political and religious, which man himself has created. Jupiter’s downfall is brought about by his own offspring; man himself can overthrow tyranny. In the marriage of Jupiter and Thetis, Shelley seems to portray the overweening arrogance through which a political tyranny invests itself with the pomp of a false glory and which always precedes its downfall. The form of Demogorgon assumed by the child of this union undoubtedly means Revolution, that Revolution which follows the marriage of unrighteous power to arrogant display.[108] Demogorgon may be looked upon, too, as Reason; Asia, the Spirit of Love, comes in contact with Demogorgon, Reason, and moves it to action. The poet here means to image to us the profound truth, that it is only through contact with emotion that abstract thought can become roused to action and be a vital and dynamic power in the sphere of practical life. It is only after having met Demogorgon that the power of Asia is set free. If reason must be inspired by passion before it can prevail, “love on the other hand must become instinct with wisdom before it can be made manifest in that glory which shall save the world.”
After the interview with Demogorgon, Asia, love, is transfigured, “its rosy warmth pervades the whole creation, and its power is revealed triumphantly supreme. This is the act through which, in the secret mystery of creation, the redemption of Prometheus is achieved. Thus through a double process, destructive and constructive—by revolution and by love—is set free the human soul.”[109] Rossetti regards Prometheus as the anthropomorphic God, created by the mind of man, and tyrannizing over its creator; but surely, as Miss Scudder says, the myth is quite as much political as theological.
Prometheus Unbound was fiercely attacked in the Quarterly, and Shelley, thinking that Southey was the author of the article, wrote to him about it. Southey answered him that he did not write the article in question, and at the same time read him a lecture on the necessity of giving up his evil principles. Shelley felt that he was being misjudged and wrongfully accused by one whom he could not suspect of ill-will, and this no doubt helped to keep him a radical, even if he were inclined at this time to become more conservative.
During 1819, meetings were held all over the country by the laboring classes to consider ways and means of bettering their condition. On August 16, 1819, a huge one was held at St. Peter’s Field, Manchester, with the view of urging parliamentary reform. The magistrates had previously declared that such a meeting would be illegal and the city authorities had made extensive preparations for the preservation of the peace. After an enormous crowd had gathered around the speakers, forty of the yeomanry cavalry attempted to make their way through the multitude to arrest the ringleaders. When it was found that they could not reach the platform a hasty order was given to three hundred hussars to disperse the crowd. They made a terrific charge, which resulted in the killing of six people and in the wounding of fifty or sixty others. The news of this affair roused in Shelley violent emotions of indignation and compassion. Writing to his publisher, Mr. Ollier, he thus comments on the affair: “The same day that your letter came, came the news of the Manchester work, and the torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins. I wait anxiously to hear how the country will express its sense of this bloody, murderous oppression of its destroyers. Something must be done. What, yet, I know not.” He calls it “an infernal business” and says that it is but the distant thunders of the terrible storm which is fast approaching. “The tyrants here, as in the French Revolution, have first shed blood.”
The Manchester “massacre” inspired Shelley to write the Mask of Anarchy. Leigh Hunt was asked to print it in The Examiner, but he refused. “I did not insert it,” Hunt wrote, “because I thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kind-heartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse.” In this poem Shelley is not so vague and indefinite as he is in Prometheus Unbound. He shows there that he has a grasp of the practical wants of men. “What art thou, Freedom?” Shelley asks, and he replies:
Thou art clothes, and fire, and food
For the trampled multitude—
No—in countries that are free
Such starvation cannot be
As in England now we see.
Even here Shelley exhorts his countrymen to seek reform through peaceful methods. He tells them to oppose meekness and resoluteness to violence and tyranny; and then the tyrants
will return with shame
To the place from which they came
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.
There is very little recorded concerning the relations that existed between Robert Owen (England’s first socialist of note) and Shelley. One of Owen’s biographers states that Shelley’s spirit appeared to Owen at a spiritualistic seance, and that Owen exclaimed, “Oh, there is my old friend, Shelley.” It is certain at any rate that Owen was a close friend of Godwin, and consequently had at least an indirect influence on Shelley. Queen Mab, moreover, was the gospel of the Owenites.
For Shelley’s later views we are indebted to his Philosophical View of Reform which Professor Dowden discusses in his volume Transcripts and Studies. Shelley wrote to Leigh Hunt on May 26, 1820, and enquired if he knew any bookseller who would publish an octavo volume, entitled a Philosophical View of Reform. The plan of the work was to include chapters on: (1) The sentiment of the necessity of change; (2) its causes and its objects; (3) practicability and necessity of change; (4) state of parties as regards it; (5) probable, possible, and desirable mode in which it should be effected. The work was never published, however, and it is said that the manuscript cannot now be found.[110]