gleaming-eyed Greeks, of the Bay of Salamis, and of the Hermes of
Praxiteles,--and then cast my eyes on the Greatest Authority, my guide,
my Teuton master, with his barbarian babble and his ham-bone and his
self-importance, I begin to wonder whether I cannot somehow get rid of
the man and leave him behind. Alas, we cannot do that; we can only
remember his traits.
Our British mentors, who flank the German scholars as we move gently
forward toward Greek feeling, form so complete a contrast to the Teutons
that we hardly believe that _both_ kinds can represent genuine
scholarship. The Britons are gentlemen, afternoon callers, who eat small
cakes, row on the Thames, and are all for morality. They are men of
letters. They write in prose and in verse, and belong to the aesthetic
fraternity. They, like the Teutons, are attached to institutions of
learning, namely, to Oxford and Cambridge. They resemble the Germans,
however, in but a single trait--the conviction that they understand
Greece.
The thesis of the British belle-lettrists, to which they devote their
energies, might be stated thus: British culture includes Greek culture.
They are very modern, very English, very sentimental, these British
scholars. While the German Doctors use Greek as a stalking-horse for
Teutonic psychology, these English gentlemen use it as a dressmaker's
model upon which they exhibit home-made English lyrics and British stock
morality. The lesson which Browning sees in _Alcestis_ is the same that
he gave us in _James Lee's Wife_. Browning's appeal is always the appeal
to robust feeling as the salvation of the world. Gilbert Murray, on the
other hand, sheds a sad, clinging, Tennysonian morality over Dionysus.
Jowett is happy to announce that Plato is theologically sound, and gives
him a ticket-of-leave to walk anywhere in England. Swinburne clings to
that belief in sentiment which marks the Victorian era, but Swinburne
finds the key to life in unrestraint instead of in restraint.
There is a whole school of limp Grecism in England, which has grown up
out of Keats's Grecian Urn, and which is now buttressed with philosophy
and adorned with scholarship; and no doubt it does bear some sort of
relation to Greece and to Greek life. But this Anglican Grecism has the
quality which all modern British art exhibits,--the very quality which
the Greeks could not abide,--it is tinged with _excess_. The Briton
likes strong flavors. He likes them in his tea, in his port wine, in his
concert-hall songs, in his pictures of home and farm life. He likes
something unmistakable, something with a smack that lets you know that
the thing has arrived. In his literature he is the same. Dickens,
Carlyle, Tennyson lay it on thick with sentiment. Keats drips with
aromatic poetry, which has a wonder and a beauty of its own--and whose
striking quality is _excess_. The scented, wholesale sweetness of the
modern aesthetic school in England goes home to its admirers because it
is easy art. Once enjoy a bit of it and you never forget it. It is
always the same, the 'old reliable,' the Oxford brand, the true, safe,
British, patriotic, moral, noble school of verse; which exhibits the
manners and feelings of a gentleman, and has success written in every
trait of its physiognomy.
How this school of poetry invaded Greece is part of the history of
British expansion in the nineteenth century. In the Victorian era the
Englishman brought cricket and morning prayers into South Africa. Robert
Browning established himself and his carpet-bag in comfortable lodgings
on the Acropolis--which he spells with a K to show his intimate
acquaintance with recent research. It must be confessed that Robert
Browning's view of Greece never pleased, even in England. It was too
obviously R. B. over again. It was Pippa and Bishop Blougram with a few
pomegranate seeds and unexpected orthographies thrown in. The
Encyclopaedia Britannica is against it, and suggests, wittily enough,
that one can hardly agree with Browning that Heracles got drunk for the
purpose of keeping up _other_ people's spirits.
So, also, Edward FitzGerald was never taken seriously by the English;
but this was for another reason. His translations are the best
transcriptions from the Greek ever done by this British school; but
FitzGerald never took himself seriously. I believe that if he had only
been ambitious, and had belonged to the academic classes,--like Jowett
for instance,--he could have got Oxford behind him, and we should all
have been obliged to regard him as a great apostle of Hellenism. But he
was a poor-spirited sort of man, and never worked up his lead.
Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, began the serious profession of being
a Grecian. He took it up when there was nothing in it, and he developed
a little sect of his own, out of which later came Swinburne and Gilbert
Murray, each of whom is the true British article. While Swinburne is by
far the greater poet, Murray is by far the more important of the two
from the ethnological point of view. Murray was the first man to talk
boldly about God, and to introduce his name into all Greek myths, using
it as a fair translation of any Greek adjective. There is a danger in
this boldness. The reader's attention becomes hypnotized with wondering
in what manner God is to be introduced into the next verse. The reader
becomes so concerned about Mr. Murray's religious obsessions that he
forgets the Greek altogether and remembers only Shakespeare's hostess in
her distress over the dying Falstaff: 'Now I, to comfort him, bid him 'a
should not think of God,--I hoped there was no need to trouble himself
with any such thoughts yet.'
Murray and Arnold are twins in ethical endeavor. I think that it was
Arnold who first told the British that Greece was noted for melancholy
and for longings. He told them that chastity, temperance, nudity, and a
wealth of moral rhetoric marked the young man of the Periclean period.
Even good old Dean Plumptre has put this young man into his prefaces.
Swinburne added the hymeneal note,--the poetic nature-view,--of which
the following may serve as an example:--
And the trees in their season brought forth and were kindled anew
By the warmth of the mixture of marriage, the child-bearing dew.
There is hardly a page in Swinburne's Hellenizing verse that does not
blossom with Hymen. The passages would be well suited for use in the
public schools of to-day where sex-knowledge in its poetic aspects is
beginning to be judiciously introduced.
This contribution of Swinburne's,--the hymeneal touch,--and Murray's
discovery that the word God could be introduced with effect anywhere,
went like wildfire over England. They are characteristic of the latest
phase of Anglo-Grecism.
Gilbert Murray has, in late years, had the field to himself. He stands
as the head and front of Greek culture in England. It is he, more than
any one else, who is the figure-head of dramatic poetry in England
to-day; and, as such, his influence must be met, and, as it were, passed
through, by the American student who is studying the Greek classics.
II
The Greek genius is so different from the modern English genius that
they cannot understand each other. How shall we come to see this
clearly? The matter is difficult in the extreme; because we are all
soaked in modern feeling, and in America we are all drenched in British
influence. The desire of Britain to annex ancient Greece, the deep-felt
need that the English writers and poets of the nineteenth century have
shown to edge and nudge nearer to Greek feeling, is familiar to all of
us. Swinburne expresses his Hellenic longings by his hymeneal strains,
Matthew Arnold by sweetness and light, Gilbert Murray by sweetness and
pathos--and all through the divine right of Victorian expansion. It has
been a profoundly unconscious development in all these men. They have
instinctively and innocently attached their little oil-can to the
coattails of Euripides and of the other great Attic writers. They have
not been interested in Greek for its own sake. They have been interested
in the exploitations of Greece for the purpose of British consumption.
Some people will contend that none of the writers of this school are,
properly speaking, professional scholars. Others will contend that
professional scholarship is tolerable only because it tends to promote
cultivation of a non-professional kind. For instance, Jowett was never
regarded as a scholar by the darkest-dyed Oxford experts, and Jebb of
Cambridge is undoubtedly regarded as an amateur in Germany, because he
descends to making translations. The severest classicist is able to talk
only about texts. He is too great to do anything else. And yet, properly
speaking, these men are all scholars. Murray represents popular
scholarship to a degree which would have shocked Matthew Arnold, just as
Arnold himself would have been poison to Nauck--Nauck the author of the
text of Euripides.
But they are all scholars, and Murray, who is an Australian, and who
rose into University prominence on the wings of University Extension,
and through his lyric gift rather than through his learning, belongs to
Oxford by race and by nature, as well as by adoption. The outsider ought
not to confuse him with the whole of Oxford, and the whole of Oxford
ought not to disown him after making him the head and front of its
Hellenism so far as the world at large can judge. Murray, as St. Paul
would say, is not the inner Oxford; but Murray is the outer Oxford which
the inner Oxford cannot too eagerly sniff at or condemn; because he is
no accident, but a true-bred Oxonian of the Imperial epoch.
The tendency of universities has ever been to breed cliques and secret
societies, to produce embroideries and start hothouses of specialized
feeling. They do well in doing this: it is all they can do. We should
look upon them as great furnaces of culture, largely social in their
influence, which warm and nourish the general temperament of a nation.
Would that in America we had a local school of classic cultivation half
as interesting as this Oxford Movement--quaint and non-intellectual as
it is! It is alive and it is national. While most absurd from the point
of view of universal culture, it is most satisfactory from the domestic
point of view--as indeed everything in England is. If in America we ever
develop any true universities, they will have faults of their own. Their
defects will be of a new strain, no doubt, and will reflect our national
shortcomings. These thoughts but teach us that we cannot use other
people's eyes or other people's eye-glasses. We have still to grind the
lenses through which we shall, in our turn, observe the classics.
III
Ancient religion is of all subjects in the world the most difficult.
Every religion, even at the time it was in progress, was always
completely misunderstood, and the misconceptions have increased with the
ages. They multiply with every monument that is unearthed. If the
Eleusinian mysteries were going at full blast to-day, so that we could
attend them, as we do the play at Oberammergau, their interpretation
would still present difficulties. Mommsen and Rhode would disagree. But
ten thousand years from now, when nothing survives except a line out of
St. John's Gospel and a tablet stating that Fischer played the part of
Christ for three successive decades, many authoritative books will be
written about Oberammergau, and reputations will be made over it.
Anything which we approach as religion becomes a nightmare of
suggestion, and hales us hither and thither with thoughts beyond the
reaches of the soul.
The _Alcestis_ and the _Bacchantes_ are, in this paper, approached with
the idea that they are _plays_. This seems not to have been done often
enough with Greek plays. They are regarded as examples of the sublime,
as forms of philosophic thought, as moral essays, as poems, even as
illustrations of dramatic law, and they are unquestionably all of these
things. But they were primarily plays--intended to pass the time and
exhilarate the emotions. They came into being as plays, and their form
and make-up can best be understood by a study of the dramatic business
in them. They become poems and philosophy incidentally, and afterwards:
they were born as plays. A playwright is always an entertainer, and
unless his desire to hold his audience overpoweringly predominates, he
will never be a success. It is probable that even with AEschylus,--who
stands _hors ligne_ as the only playwright in history who was really in
earnest about morality,--we should have to confess that his passion as a
dramatic artist came _first_. He held his audiences by strokes of
tremendous dramatic novelty. Both the stage traditions and the plays
themselves bear this out. The fact is that it is not easy to keep people
sitting in a theatre; and unless the idea of holding their attention
predominates with the author, they will walk out, and he will not be
able to deliver the rest of his story.
In the grosser forms of dramatic amusement--for example, where a bicycle
acrobat is followed by a comic song--we are not compelled to find
philosophic depth of idea in the sequence. But in dealing with works of
great and refined dramatic genius like the _Tempest_, or the
_Bacchantes_, where the emotions played upon are subtly interwoven,
there will always be found certain minds which remain unsatisfied with
the work of art itself, but must have it explained. Even Beethoven's
Sonatas have been supplied with philosophic addenda--statements of their
meaning. We know how much Shakespeare's intentions used to puzzle the
Germans. Men feel that somewhere at the back of their own consciousness
there is a philosophy or a religion with which the arts have some
relation. In so far as these affinities are touched upon in a manner
that leaves them mysteries, we have good criticism; but when people
dogmatize about them, we have bad criticism. In the meantime the great
artist goes his way. His own problems are enough for him.
The early critics were puzzled to classify the _Alcestis_, and no
wonder, for it contains many varieties of dramatic writing. For this
very reason it is a good play to take as a sample of Greek spirit and
Greek workmanship. It is a little Greek cosmos, and it happens to depict
a side of Greek thought which is sympathetic to modern sentiment, so
that we seem to be at home in its atmosphere. The _Alcestis_ is thought
to be in a class by itself. And yet, indeed, under close examination,
every Greek play falls into a class by itself (there are only about
forty-five of them in all), and the maker of each was probably more
concerned at the time with the dramatic experiment upon which he found
himself launched than he was with any formal classification which
posterity might assign to his play.
In the _Alcestis_ Euripides made one of the best plays in the world,
full of true pathos, full of jovial humor, both of which sometimes verge
upon the burlesque. The happy ending is understood from the start, and
none of the grief is painful. Alcestis herself is the good-wife of Greek
household myth, who is ready to die for her husband. To this play the
bourgeois takes his half-grown family. He rejoices when he hears that it
is to be given. The absurdities of the fairy-tale are accepted simply.
Heracles has his club, Death his sword, Apollo his lyre. The women wail,
Admetus whines; there is buffoonery, there are tears, there is wit,
there is conventional wrangling, and that word-chopping so dear to the
Mediterranean theatre, which exists in all classic drama and survives in
the Punch and Judy show of to-day. And there is the charming return of
Heracles with the veiled lady whom he presents to Admetus as a slave for
safe keeping, whom Admetus refuses to receive for conventional reasons,
but whom every child in the audience feels to be the real Alcestis, even
before Heracles unveils her and gives her back into her husband's bosom
with speeches on both sides that are like the closing music of a dream.
The audience disperses at the close, feeling that it has spent a happy
hour. No sonata of Mozart is more completely beautiful than the
_Alcestis_. No comedy of Shakespeare approaches it in perfection. The
merit of the piece lies, not in any special idea it conveys, but
entirely in the manner in which everything is carried out.
IV
It is clear at a glance that the _Alcestis_ belongs to an epoch of
extreme sophistication. Everything has been thought out and polished;
every ornament is a poem. If a character has to give five words of
explanation or of prayer, it is done in silver. The tone is all the tone
of cultivated society, the appeal is an appeal to the refined,
casuistical intelligence. The smile of Voltaire is all through Greek
literature; and it was not until the age of Louis XIV, or the Regency,
that the modern world was again to know a refinement and a
sophistication which recall the Greek work. Now, in one word,--this
subtlety which pleases us in matters of sentiment is the very thing that
separates us from the Greek upon the profoundest questions of
philosophy. Where religious or metaphysical truth is touched upon,
either Greek sophistication carries us off our feet with a rapture which
has no true relation to the subject, or else we are offended by it. We
do not understand sophistication. The Greek has pushed aesthetic
analysis further than the modern can bear. We follow well enough through
the light issues, but when the deeper questions are reached we lose our
footing. At this point the modern cries out in applause, 'Religion,
philosophy, pure feeling, the soul!'--He cries out, 'Mystic cult,
Asiatic influence, Nature worship,--deep things over there!'--Or else he
cries, 'What amazing cruelty, what cynicism!' And yet it is none of
these things, but only the artistic perfection of the work which is
moving us. We are the victims of clever stage-management.
The cruder intelligence is ever compelled to regard the man of complex
mind as a priest or as a demon. The child, for instance, asks about the
character in a story, 'But is he a good man or a bad man, papa?' The
child must have a moral explanation of anything which is beyond his
aesthetic comprehension. So also does the modern intelligence question
the Greek.
The matter is complicated by yet another element, namely stage
convention. Our modern stage is so different from the classic stage that
we are bad judges of the Greek playwright's intentions. The quarrels
which arise as to allegorical or secondary meanings in a work of art are
generally connected with some unfamiliar feature of its setting. A great
light is thrown upon any work of art when we show how its form came into
being, and thus explain its primary meaning. Such an exposition of the
primary or apparent meaning is often sufficient to put all secondary
meanings out of court. For instance: It is, as we know, the Germans who
have found in Shakespeare a coherent philosophic intention. They think
that he wrote plays for the purpose of stating metaphysical truths. The
Englishman does not believe this, because the Englishman is familiar
with that old English stage work. He knows its traditions, its
preoccupation with story-telling, its mundane character, its
obliviousness to the sort of thing that Germany has in mind. The
Englishman knows the conventions of his own stage, and this protects
him from finding mares'-nests in Shakespeare. Again, Shakespeare's
sonnets used to be a favorite field for mystical exegesis, until Sir
Sidney Lee explained their form by reference to the sixteenth-century
sonnet literature of the continent. This put to flight many theories.
In other words, the appeal to convention is the first duty of the
scholar. But, unfortunately, in regard to the conventions of the Classic
Stage, the moderns are all in the dark. Nothing like that stage exists
to-day. We are obliged to make guesses as to its intentions, its humor,
its relation to philosophy. If the classics had only possessed a
cabinet-sized drama, like our own, we might have been at home there. But
this giant-talk, this megaphone-and-buskin method, offers us a problem
in dynamics which staggers the imagination. All we can do is to tread
lightly and guess without dogmatizing. The typical Athenian, Euripides,
was so much deeper-dyed in skepticism than any one since that day, that
really no one has ever lived who could cross-question him--let alone
expound the meanings of his plays. In reading Euripides, we find
ourselves, at moments, ready to classify him as a satirist, and at other
moments as a man of feeling. Of course he was both. Sometimes he seems
like a religious man, and again, like a charlatan. Of course he was
neither. He was a playwright.
V
The _Bacchantes_, like every other Greek play, is the result, first, of
the legend, second, of the theatre. There is always some cutting and
hacking, due to the difficulty of getting the legend into the building.
Legends differ as to their dramatic possibilities, and the incidents
which are to be put on the stage must be selected by the poet. The site
of the play must be fixed. Above all, a Chorus must be arranged for.
The choosing of a Chorus is indeed one of the main problems of the
tragedian. If he can hit on a natural sort of Chorus he is a made man.
In the _Alcestis_ we saw that the whole background of grief and wailing
was one source of the charm of the play. Not only are the tragic parts
deepened, but the gayer scenes are set off by this feature. If the fable
provides no natural and obvious Chorus, the playwright must bring his
Chorus on the stage by stretching the imagination of the audience. He
employs a group of servants or of friends of the hero; if the play is a
marine piece, he uses sailors. The whole atmosphere of his play depends
upon the happiness of his choice.
In the _Agamemnon_ 'the old men left-at-home' form the Chorus. There is
enough dramatic power in this one idea to carry a play. It is so
natural: the old men are on the spot; they are interested; they are the
essence of the story, and yet external to it. These old men are, indeed,
the archetype of all choruses--a collection of by-standers, a sort of
little dummy audience, intended to steer the great, real audience into a
comprehension of the play.
The Greek dramatist found this very useful machine, the Chorus, at his
elbow; but he was, on the other hand, greatly controlled by it. It had
ways of its own: it inherited dramatic necessities. The element of
convention and of theatrical usage is so very predominant in the
handling of Greek choruses by the poets, that we have in chorus-work
something that may be regarded almost as a constant quality. By studying
choruses one can arrive at an idea of the craft of Greek
play-writing--one can even separate the conventional from the personal
to some extent.
The Greek Chorus has no mind of its own; it merely gives echo to the
last dramatic thought. It goes forward and back, contradicts itself,
sympathizes with all parties or none, and lives in a limbo. Its real
function is to represent the slow-minded man in the audience. It does
what he does, it interjects questions and doubts, it delays the plot and
indulges in the proper emotions during the pauses. These functions are
quite limited, and were completely understood in Greek times; so much
so, that in the typical stock tragedy of the AEschylean school certain
saws, maxims, and reflections appear over and over again. One of them,
of course, was, 'See how the will of the gods works out in unexpected
ways.' Another, 'Let us be pious, and reverence something that is
perhaps behind the gods themselves.' Another, 'This is all very
extraordinary: let us hope for the best.' Another, 'Our feelings about
right and wrong must somehow be divine; traditional morality,
traditional piety, are somehow right.'
Precisely the same reflections are often put in the mouths of the
subordinate characters, and for precisely the same purpose. 'Oh, may the
quiet life be mine! Give me neither poverty nor riches: for the
destinies of the great are ever uncertain.' 'Temptation leads to
insolence, and insolence to destruction'; and so forth. Such reflections
serve the same purpose, by whomever they are uttered. They underscore
the moral of the story and assure the spectator that he has not missed
the point.