The modern direct way of looking at things—the perfectly natural outcome of habit of every man's dealing with a thing for himself and of first necessarily looking to see what the thing actually is—this directness of vision cannot help seeing that Prometheus is a god, that he is immortal, that thunder cannot kill him, that the bolt through his breast makes no wound, but will repair itself with ease, that he not only knows all this, but knows further that it is to end (as Prometheus himself declares in the play), in his own triumph. Under these circumstances the whole array of whirlwinds and lightnings become a mere pin-scratch; the whole business is a matter of that purely physical pain which every man is ashamed to make a noise of. We can conceive a mere man fronting all these terrors of storm and thunder with unbowed head and serene countenance, in the consciousness that the whitest of these lightnings cannot singe an eyelash of his immortal personality; how, then, can it be expected that we shall be greatly impressed with the endurance of these ills by a god to whose greater resistive endowment the whole system of this gross thrust-and-smite of iron and fire is no more than the momentary tease of a gnat! To the audience of Æschylus, not so; they shiver and groan; they know not themselves.
I do not know how I can better show the grossness of this conception of pain than by opposing to it a subtile modern conception thereof whose contrast will fairly open out before us the truly prodigious gulf between the average personality of the time of Æschylus and that of ourselves. The modern conception, I refer to is Keats' Ode on Melancholy; which, indeed, if one may say a word obiter, out of the fullness of one's heart—I am often inclined to think for all-in-all, that is, for thoughts most mortally compacted, for words which come forth, each trembling and giving off light like a morning-star, and for the pure beauty of the spirit and strength and height of the spirit,—which, I say, for all-in-all, I am often inclined to think, reaches the highest height yet touched in the lyric line.
ODE ON MELANCHOLY.
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By night-shade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt-sand wave,
Or in the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-moth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.