the fact of its connection with religion. The season at which it was
performed was the festival of Dionysus; about his altar the chorus
danced; and the object of the performance was the representation of
scenes out of the lives of ancient heroes. The subject of the drama was
thus strictly prescribed; it must be selected out of a cycle of legends
familiar to the audience; and whatever freedom might be allowed to the
poet in his treatment of the theme, whatever the reflections he might
embroider upon it, the speculative or ethical views, the criticism of
contemporary life, all must be subservient to the main object originally
proposed, the setting forth, for edification as well as for delight, of
some episodes in the lives of those heroes of the past who were
considered not only to be greater than their descendants, but to be the
sons of gods and worthy themselves of worship as divine.
By this fundamental condition the tragedy of the Greeks is distinguished
sharply, on the one hand from the Shakespearian drama, on the other from
the classical drama of the French. The tragedies of Shakespeare are
devoid, one might say, or at least comparatively devoid, of all
preconceptions. He was free to choose what subject he liked and to treat
it as he would; and no sense of obligation to religious or other points
of view, no feeling for traditions descended from a sacred past and not
lightly to be handled by those who were their trustees for the future,
sobered or restrained for evil or for good his half-barbaric genius. He
flung himself upon life with the irresponsible ardour of the discoverer
of a new continent; shaped and re-shaped it as he chose; carved from it
now the cynicism of _Measure for Measure_, now the despair of _Hamlet_
and of _Lear_, now the radiant magnanimity of _The Tempest_, and
departed leaving behind him not a map or chart, but a series of mutually
incompatible landscapes.
What Shakespeare gave, in short, was a many-sided representation of
life; what the Greek dramatist gave was an interpretation. But an
interpretation not simply personal to himself, but representative of the
national tradition and belief. The men whose deeds and passions he
narrated were the patterns and examples on the one hand, on the other
the warnings of his race; the gods who determined the fortunes they
sang, were working still among men; the moral laws that ruled the past
ruled the present too; and the history of the Hellenic race moved, under
a visible providence, from its divine origin onward to an end that would
be prosperous or the reverse according as later generations should
continue to observe the worship and traditions of their fathers
descended from heroes and gods.
And it is the fact that in this sense it was representative of the
national consciousness, that distinguishes the Greek tragedy from the
classical drama of the French. For the latter, though it imitated the
ancients in outward form, was inspired with a totally different spirit.
The kings and heroes whose fortunes it narrated were not the ancestors
of the French race; they had no root in its affections, no connection
with its religious beliefs, no relation to its ethical conceptions. The
whole ideal set forth was not that which really inspired the nation, but
at best that which was supposed to inspire the court; and the whole
drama, like a tree transplanted to an alien soil, withers and dies for
lack of the nourishment which the tragedy of the Greeks unconsciously
imbibed from its encompassing air of national tradition.
Such then was the general character of the Greek tragedy--an
interpretation of the national ideal. Let us now proceed to follow out
some of the consequences involved in this conception.
In the first place, the theme represented is the life and fate of
ancient heroes--of personages, that is to say, greater than ordinary
men, both for good and for evil, in their qualities and in their
achievements, pregnant with fateful issues, makers or marrers of the
fortunes of the world. Tragic and terrible their destiny may be, but
never contemptible or squalid. Behind all suffering, behind sin and
crime, must lie redeeming magnanimity. A complete villain, says
Aristotle, is not a tragic character, for he has no hold upon the
sympathies; if he prosper, it is an outrage on common human feeling; if
he fall into disaster, it is merely what he deserves. Neither is it
admissible to represent the misfortunes of a thoroughly good man, for
that is merely painful and distressing; and least of all is it tolerable
gratuitously to introduce mere baseness, or madness, or other
aberrations from human nature. The true tragic hero is a man of high
place and birth who having a nature not ignoble has fallen into sin and
pays in suffering the penalty of his act. Nothing could throw more light
on the distinguishing characteristics of the Greek drama than these few
remarks of Aristotle, and nothing could better indicate how close, in
the Greek mind, was the connection between aesthetic and ethical
judgments. The canon of Aristotle would exclude as proper themes for
tragedy the character and fate, say, of Richard III--the absolutely bad
man suffering his appropriate desert; or of Kent and Cordelia--the
absolutely good, brought into unmerited affliction; and that not merely
because such themes offend the moral sense, but because by so offending
they destroy the proper pleasure of the tragic art. The whole aesthetic
effect is limited by ethical presuppositions; and to outrage these is to
defeat the very purpose of tragedy.
Specially interesting in this connection are the strictures passed on
Euripides in the passage of the _Frogs_ of Aristophanes to which
allusion has already been made. Euripides is there accused of lowering
the tragic art by introducing--what? Women in love! The central theme of
modern tragedy! It is the boast of Aeschylus that there is not one of
his plays which touches on this subject:
"I never allow'd of your lewd Sthenoboeas
Or filthy detestable Phaedras--not I!
Indeed I should doubt if my drama throughout
Exhibit an instance of woman in love!"[80]
And there can be little doubt that with a Greek audience this would
count to him as a merit, and that the shifting of the centre of interest
by Euripides from the sterner passions of heroes and of kings to this
tenderer phase of human feeling would be felt even by those whom it
charmed to be a declension from the height of the older tragedy.
And to this limitation of subject corresponds a limitation of treatment.
The Greek tragedy is composed from a definite point of view, with the
aim not merely to represent but also to interpret the theme. Underlying
the whole construction of the plot, the dialogue, the reflections, the
lyric interludes, is the intention to illustrate some general moral law,
some common and typical problem, some fundamental truth. Of the elder
dramatists at any rate, Aeschylus and Sophocles, one may even say that
it was their purpose--however imperfectly achieved--to "justify the
ways of God to man." To represent suffering as the punishment of sin is
the constant bent of Aeschylus; to justify the law of God against the
presumption of man is the central idea of Sophocles. In either case the
whole tone is essentially religious. To choose such a theme as Lear, to
treat it as Shakespeare has treated it, to leave it, as it were,
bleeding from a thousand wounds, in mute and helpless entreaty for the
healing that is never to be vouchsafed--this would have been repulsive,
if not impossible, to a Greek tragedian. Without ever descending from
concrete art to the abstractions of mere moralising, without ever
attempting to substitute a verbal formula for the full and complex
perception that grows out of a representation of life, the ancient
dramatists were nevertheless, in the whole apprehension of their theme,
determined by a more or less conscious speculative bias; the world to
them was not merely a splendid chaos, it was a divine plan; and even in
its darkest hollows, its passes most perilous and bleak, they have their
hand, though doubtful perhaps and faltering, upon the clue that is to
lead them up to the open sky.
It is consonant with this account of the nature of Greek tragedy that it
should have laid more stress upon action than upon character. The
interest was centred on the universal bearing of certain acts and
situations, on the light which the experience represented threw on the
whole tendency and course of human life, not on the sentiments and
motives of the particular personages introduced. The characters are
broad and simple, not developing for the most part, but fixed, and
fitted therefore to be the mediums of direct action, of simple issues,
and typical situations. In the Greek tragedy the general point of view
predominates over the idiosyncrasies of particular persons. It is human
nature that is represented in the broad, not this or that highly
specialised variation; and what we have indicated as the general aim,
the interpretation of life, is never obscured by the predominance of
exceptional and so to speak, accidental characteristics. Man is the
subject of the Greek drama; the subject of the modern novel is Tom and
Dick.
Finally, to the realisation of this general aim, the whole form of the
Greek drama was admirably adapted. It consisted very largely of
conversations between two persons, representing two opposed points of
view, and giving occasion for an almost scientific discussion of every
problem of action raised in the play; and between these conversations
were inserted lyric odes in which the chorus commented on the
situation, bestowed advice or warning, praise or blame, and finally
summed up the moral of the whole. Through the chorus, in fact, the poet
could speak in his own person, and impose upon the whole tragedy any
tone which he desired. Periodically he could drop the dramatist and
assume the preacher; and thus ensure that his play should be, what we
have seen was its recognised ideal, not merely a representation but an
interpretation of life.
But this without ceasing to be a work of art. In attempting to analyse
in abstract terms the general character of the Greek tragedy we have
necessarily thrown into the shade what after all was its primary and
most essential aspect; an aspect, however, of which a full appreciation
could only be attained not by a mere perusal of the test, but by what is
unfortunately for ever beyond our power, the witnessing of an actual
representation as it was given on the Greek stage. For from a purely
aesthetic point of view the Greek drama must be reckoned among the most
perfect of art forms.
Taking place in the open air, on the sunny slope of a hill, valley and
plain or islanded sea stretching away below to meet the blazing blue of
a cloudless sky, the moving pageant, thus from the first set in tune
with nature, brought to a focus of splendour the rays of every separate
art. More akin to an opera than to a play it had, as its basis, music.
For the drama had developed out of the lyric ode, and retained
throughout what was at first its only element, the dance and song of a
mimetic chorus. By this centre of rhythmic motion and pregnant melody
the burden of the tale was caught up and echoed and echoed again, as the
living globe divided into spheres of answering song, the clear and
precise significance of the plot, never obscure to the head, being thus
brought home in music to the passion of the heart, the idea embodied in
lyric verse, the verse transfigured by song, and song and verse
reflected as in a mirror to the eye by the swing and beat of the limbs
they stirred to consonance of motion. And while such was the character
of the odes that broke the action of the play, the action itself was an
appeal not less to the ear and to the eye than to the passion and the
intellect. The circumstances of the representation, the huge auditorium
in the open air, lent themselves less to "acting" in our sense of the
term, than to attitude and declamation. The actors raised on high boots
above their natural height, their faces hidden in masks and their tones
mechanically magnified, must have relied for their effects not upon
facial play, or rapid and subtle variations of voice and gesture, but
upon a certain statuesque beauty of pose, and a chanting intonation of
that majestic iambic verse whose measure would have been obscured by a
rapid and conversational delivery. The representation would thus become
moving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep of
music between the intenser interludes of the chorus; and the spectator
without being drawn away by an imitative realism from the calm of
impassioned contemplation into the fever and fret of a veritable actor
on the scene, received an impression based throughout on that clear
intellectual foundation, that almost prosaic lucidity of sentiment and
plot, which is preserved to us in the written text, but raised by the
accompanying appeal to the sense, made as it must have been made by such
artists as the Greeks, by the grouping of forms and colours, the
recitative, the dance and the song, to such a greatness and height of
aesthetic significance as can hardly have been realised by any other
form of art production.
The nearest modern analogy to what the ancient drama must have been is
to be found probably in the operas of Wagner, who indeed was strongly
influenced by the tragedy of the Greeks. It was his ideal like theirs,
to combine the various branches of art, employing not only music but
poetry, sculpture, painting and the dance, for the representation of his
dramatic theme; and his conception also to make art the interpreter of
life, reflecting in a national drama the national consciousness, the
highest action and the deepest passion and thought of the German race.
To consider how far in this attempt he falls short of or goes beyond the
achievement of the Greeks, and to examine the wide dissimilarities that
underlie the general identity of aim, would be to wander too far afield
from our present theme. But the comparison may be recommended to those
who are anxious to form a concrete idea of what the effect of a Greek
tragedy may have been, and to clothe in imagination the dead bones of
the literary text with the flesh and blood of a representation to the
sense.
Meantime, to assist the reader to realise with somewhat greater
precision the bearing of the foregoing remarks, it may be worth while to
give an outline sketch of one of the most celebrated of the Greek
tragedies, the _Agamemnon_ of Aeschylus.
The hero of the drama belongs to that heroic house whose tragic history
was among the most terrible and the most familiar to a Greek audience.
Tantalus, the founder of the family, for some offence against the gods,
was suffering in Hades the punishment which is christened by his name.
His son Pelops was stained with the blood of Myrtilus. Of the two sons
of the next generation, Thyestes seduced the wife of his brother Atreus;
and Atreus in return killed the sons of Thyestes, and made the father
unwittingly eat the flesh of the murdered boys. Agamemnon, son of
Atreus, to propitiate Artemis, sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia, and in
revenge was murdered by Clytemnestra his wife. And Clytemnestra was
killed by Orestes, her son, in atonement for the death of Agamemnon. For
generations the race had been dogged by crime and punishment; and in
choosing for his theme the murder of Agamemnon the dramatist could
assume in his audience so close a familiarity with the past history of
the House that he could call into existence by an allusive word that
sombre background of woe to enhance the terrors of his actual
presentation. The figures he brought into vivid relief joined hands with
menacing forms that faded away into the night of the future and the
past; while above them hung, intoning doom, the phantom host of Furies.
Yet at the outset of the drama all promises well. The watchman on the
roof of the palace, in the tenth year of his watch, catches sight at
last of the signal fire that announces the capture of Troy and the
speedy return of Agamemnon. With joy he proclaims to the House the
long-delayed and welcome news; yet even in the moment of exultation lets
slip a doubtful phrase hinting at something behind, which he dares not
name, something which may turn to despair the triumph of victory.
Hereupon enter the chorus of Argive elders, chanting as they move to the
measure of a stately march. They sing how ten years before Agamemnon and
Menelaus had led forth the host of Greece, at the bidding of the Zeus
who protects hospitality, to recover for Menelaus Helen his wife,
treacherously stolen by Paris. Then, as they take their places and begin
their rhythmic dance, in a strain of impassioned verse that is at once a
narrative and a lyric hymn, they tell, or rather present in a series of
vivid images, flashing as by illumination of lightning out of a night of
veiled and sombre boding, the tale of the deed that darkened the
starting of the host--the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the goddess whose
wrath was delaying the fleet at Aulis. In verse, in music, in pantomime,
the scene lives again--the struggle in the father's heart, the
insistence of his brother chiefs, the piteous glance of the girl, and at
last the unutterable end; while above and through it all rings like a
knell of fate the refrain that is the motive of the whole drama:
"Sing woe, sing woe, but may the Good prevail."
At the conclusion of the ode enters Clytemnestra. She makes a formal
announcement to the chorus of the fall of Troy; describes the course of
the signal-fire from beacon to beacon as it sped, and pictures in
imagination the scenes even then taking place in the doomed city. On her
withdrawal the chorus break once more into song and dance. To the music
of a solemn hymn they point the moral of the fall of Troy, the certain
doom of violence and fraud descended upon Paris and his House. Once more
the vivid pictures flash from the night of woe--Helen in her fatal
beauty stepping lightly to her doom, the widower's nights of mourning
haunted by the ghost of love, the horrors of the war that followed, the
slain abroad and the mourners at home, the change of living flesh and
blood for the dust and ashes of the tomb. At last with a return to their
original theme, the doom of insolence, the chorus close their ode and
announce the arrival of a messenger from Troy. Talthybius, the herald,
enters as spokesman of the army and king, describing the hardships they
have suffered and the joy of the triumphant issue. To him Clytemnestra
announces, in words of which the irony is patent to the audience, her
sufferings in the absence of her husband and her delight at the prospect
of his return. He will find her, she says, as he left her, a faithful
watcher of the home, her loyalty sure, her honour undefiled. Then
follows another choral ode, similar in theme to the last, dwelling on
the woe brought by the act of Paris upon Troy, the change of the bridal
song to the trump of war and the dirge of death; contrasting, in a
profusion of splendid tropes, the beauty of Helen with the curse to
which it is bound; and insisting once more on the doom that attends
insolence and pride. At the conclusion of this song the measure changes
to a march, and the chorus turn to welcome the triumphant king.
Agamemnon enters, and behind him the veiled and silent figure of a
woman. After greeting the gods of his House, the King, in brief and
stilted phrase, acknowledges the loyalty of the chorus, but hints at
much that is amiss which it must be his first charge to set right.
Hereupon enters Clytemnestra, and in a speech of rhetorical exaggeration
tells of her anxious waiting for her lord and her inexpressible joy at
his return. In conclusion she directs that purple cloth be spread upon
his path that he may enter the house as befits a conqueror. After a show
of resistance, Agamemnon yields the point, and the contrast at which
the dramatist aims is achieved. With the pomp of an eastern monarch,
always repellent to the Greek mind, the King steps across the threshold,
steps, as the audience knows, to his death. The higher the reach of his
power and pride the more terrible and swift is the nemesis; and
Clytemnestra follows in triumph with the enigmatic cry upon her lips:
"Zeus who art god of fulfilment, fulfil my prayers." As she withdraws
the chorus begin a song of boding fear, the more terrible that it is
still indefinite. Something is going to happen--the presentiment is
sure. But what, but what? They search the night in vain. Meantime,
motionless and silent waits the figure of the veiled woman. It is
Cassandra, the prophetess, daughter of Priam of Troy, whom Agamemnon has
carried home as his prize. Clytemnestra returns to urge her to enter the
house; she makes no sign and utters no word. The queen changes her tone
from courtesy to anger and rebuke; the figure neither stirs nor speaks;
and Clytemnestra at last with an angry threat leaves her and returns to
the palace. Then, and not till then, a cry breaks from the stranger's
lips, a passionate cry to Apollo who gave her her fatal gift. All the
sombre history of the House to which she has been brought, the woe that
has been and the woe that is to come, passes in pictures across her
inner sense. In a series of broken ejaculations, not sentences but lyric
cries, she evokes the scenes of the past and of the future. Blood drips
from the palace; in its chambers the Furies crouch; the murdered sons of
Thyestes wail in its haunted courts; and ever among the visions of the
past that one of the future floats and fades, clearly discerned,
impossible to avert, the murder of a husband by a wife; and in the rear
of that, most pitiful of all, the violent death of the seer who sees in
vain and may not help. Between Cassandra and the Chorus it is a duet of
anguish and fear; in the broken lyric phrases a phantom music wails;
till at last, at what seems the breaking-point, the tension is relaxed,
and dropping into the calmer iambic recitative, Cassandra tells her
message in plainer speech and clearly proclaims the murder of the King.
Then, with a last appeal to the avenger that is to come, she enters the
palace alone to meet her death.--The stage is empty. Suddenly a cry is
heard from within; again, and then again; while the chorus hesitate the
deed is done; the doors are thrown open, and Clytemnestra is seen
standing over the corpses of her victims. All disguise is now thrown
off; the murderess avows and triumphs in her deed; she justifies it as
vengeance for the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and sees in herself not a free
human agent but the incarnate curse of the House of Tantalus. And now
for the first time appears the adulterer Aegisthus, who has planned the
whole behind the scenes. He too is an avenger, for he is the son of that
Thyestes who was made to feed on his own children's flesh. The murder of
Agamemnon is but one more link in the long chain of hereditary guilt;
and with that exposition of the pitiless law of punishment and crime
this chapter of the great drama comes to a close. But the _Agamemnon_ is
only the first of a series of three plays closely connected and meant to
be performed in succession; and the problem raised in the first of them,
the crime that cries for punishment and the punishment that is itself a
new crime, is solved in the last by a reconciliation of the powers of
heaven and hell, and the pardon of the last offender in the person of
Orestes. To sketch, however, the plan of the other dramas of the trilogy
would be to trespass too far upon our space and time. It is enough to
have illustrated, by the example of the _Agamemnon_, the general
character of a Greek tragedy; and those who care to pursue the subject
further must be referred to the text of the plays themselves.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 79: From "The Greek View of Life," 1909 (sixth edition). By
permission of Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Co.]
[Footnote 80: From Aristophanes' "Frogs," l. 1043. Translated by Frere.]
SHAKESPEARE[81]
THOMAS CARLYLE