Browning and His Century

by Helen A. Clarke

In the meantime, the over-souls of humanity—Prometheus, symbolic of thought or knowledge, is reunited to Asia, his spouse, symbolic of Nature or emotion, from whom he has long been separated and together with Asia’s sisters, Panthea and Ione—retire to the wonderful cave where they are henceforth to dwell and where their occupations are inspired by the most childlike and exalted moods of the soul.

Before considering the bearing of their life of love and art in the cave upon the character of Aprile let us turn our attention for a moment to a remarkable passage in “Hyperion,” which poem was written as far back as 1820. Keats, like Shelley, deals with the dethronement of gods, but it is the older dynasty of Titans—Saturn and Hyperion usurped by Jupiter and Apollo. Shelley’s thought in the “Prometheus” is strongly influenced by Christian ideals, but Keats’s is thoroughly Greek.

The passing of one series of gods and the coming into power of another series of gods was a familiar idea in Greek mythology. It reflected at once the literal fact that ever higher and higher forces of nature had been deified by them, beginning with crude Nature gods and ending with symbols of the most ideal human attributes, and at the same time that their thought leaned in the direction of interpreting nature as an evolutionary process. Seizing upon this, Keats has presented in the words of the old Titan Oceanus a theory of the evolution of beauty quite as startling as a prophecy of psychological theories upon this subject as Browning’s is of cosmic and social theories. Addressing Saturn, Oceanus says:

“We fall by course of Nature’s law, not force
Of thunder, or of love....
... As thou wast not the first of powers
So art thou not the last; it cannot be:
From chaos and parental darkness came
Light, the first fruits of that intestine broil,
That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends
Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came
And with it light, and light, engendering
Upon its own producer, forthwith touched,
The whole enormous matter into life.
Upon that very hour, our parentage
The Heavens and the Earth were manifest;
Then thou first-born, and we the giant-race,
Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms
······
As Heaven and Earth are fairer far
Than chaos and blank darkness, though once chiefs,
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth
In form and shape compact and beautiful,
In will, in action free, companionship
And thousand other signs of purer life,
So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty, born of us
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old darkness: nor are we
Thereby more conquered than by us the rule
Of shapeless chaos. For ’tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might.
Yea, by that law, another race may drive
Our conquerors to mourn as we do now.”

There is in the attitude of Oceanus a magnificent acceptance of this ruthless course of nature reminding one of that taken by such men as Huxley and Clifford in the face of their own scientific discoveries, but one is immediately struck by the absence of love in the idea. An Apollo, no matter what new beauty he may have, himself, to offer, who yet disregards the beauty of Hyperion and calmly accepts the throne of the sun in his stead, does not satisfy us. What unreason it is that so splendid a being as Hyperion should be deposed! As a matter of fact, he was not deposed. He is left standing forever in our memories in splendor like the morn, for Keats did not finish the poem and no picture of the enthroned Apollo is given. Perhaps Keats remembered his earlier utterance, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” and cared for his own Hyperion too much to banish him for the sake of Apollo.

Be that as it may, the points in relation to our subject are that Shelley’s emphasis is upon the conservation of beauty, while Keats’s emphasis is upon the evolution of new beauty.

In the cave where Prometheus and Asia dwell—the cave of universal spirit—is given forth the inspiration to humanity for painting, poetry and arts, yet to be born, and all these arts return to delight them, fashioned into form by human artists. Love is the ruling principle. Therefore all forms of beautiful art are immortal. Aprile,[1] as he first appears, is an elaboration upon this idea. He would love all humanity with such intensity that he would immortalize in all forms of art—painting, poetry, music—every thought and emotion of which the human soul is capable, and this done he would say:

“His spirits created—
God grants to each a sphere to be its world,
Appointed with the various objects needed
To satisfy its own peculiar want;
So, I create a world for these my shapes
Fit to sustain their beauty and their strength.”

In short, he would found a universal art museum exactly like the cave in which Prometheus dwelt. The stress is no more than it is in Shelley upon a search for new beauty, and there is not a hint that a coming beauty shall blot out the old until Aprile recognizes Paracelsus as his king. Then he awakes to the fact that his own ideal has been partial, because he has not been a seeker after knowledge, or new beauty, and in much the same spirit as Oceanus, he exclaims:

“Lo, I forget my ruin, and rejoice
In thy success, as thou! Let our God’s praise
Go bravely through the world at last! What care
Through me or thee?”