STUDIES
OF
THE GREEK POETS
BY
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
AUTHOR OF "SKETCHES AND STUDIES IN SOUTHERN EUROPE" ETC.
_Im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen
Resolut zu leben_
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
FRANKLIN SQUARE
1880
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
CHAPTER XIV.
_GREEK TRAGEDY AND EURIPIDES._
Two Conditions for the Development of a National Drama.--The
Attic Audience.--The Persian War.--Nemesis the Cardinal Idea of
Greek Tragedy.--Traces of the Doctrine of Nemesis in Early Greek
Poetry.--The Fixed Material of Greek Tragedy.--Athens in the Age
of Euripides.--Changes introduced by him in Dramatic Art.--The
Law of Progress in all Art.--Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.--The
Treatment of #eupsychia# by Euripides.--Menoikeus.--The Death of
Eteocles and Polynices.--Polyxena.--Medea.--Hippolytus.--Electra and
Orestes.--Injustice done to Euripides by Recent Critics. Page 9
CHAPTER XV.
_THE FRAGMENTS OF ÆSCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, EURIPIDES._
Alexandrian and Byzantine Anthologies.--Titles of the Lost Plays
of Æschylus.--The _Lycurgeia_.--The Trilogy on the Story of
Achilles.--The Geography of the _Prometheus Unbound_.--Gnomic Character
of the Sophoclean Fragments.--Providence, Wealth, Love, Marriage,
Mourning.--What is True of the Sophoclean is still more True of the
Euripidean Fragments.--Mutilated Plays.--_Phaëthon_, _Erechtheus_,
_Antiope_, _Danaë_.--Goethe's Restitution of the _Phaëthon_.--Passage
on Greek Athletes in the _Autolycus_.--Love, Women, Marriage, Domestic
Affection, Children.--Death.--Stoical Endurance.--Justice and the
Punishment of Sin.--Wealth.--Noble Birth.--Heroism.--Miscellaneous
Gnomic Fragments.--The Popularity of Euripides. Page 74
CHAPTER XVI.
_THE FRAGMENTS OF THE LOST TRAGIC POETS._
Apparent Accident in the Preservation of Greek Poetry.--Criticism
among the Ancients.--Formation of Canons.--Libraries.--The Political
Vicissitudes of Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople.--Byzantine
Scholarship in the Ninth Century.--The Lost MS. of Menander.--Tragic
Fragments preserved by the Comic Poets and their Scholiasts; by
Athenæus, by Stobæus.--Aristotle.--Tragedy before Æschylus.--Fragments
of Aristarchus.--The _Medea_ of Neophron.--Ion.--The _Games_
of Achæus.--Agathon; his Character for Luxurious Living.--The
_Flower_.--Aristotle's Partiality for Agathon.--The Family of
Æschylus.--Meletus and Plato among the Tragic Playwrights.--The
School of Sophocles.--Influence of Euripides.--Family of
Carkinus.--Tragedians Ridiculed by Aristophanes.--The _Sisyphus_
of Critias.--Cleophon.--Cynical Tragedies ascribed to
Diogenes.--Extraordinary Fertility of the Attic Drama.--The Repetition
of Old Plots.--Mamercus and Dionysius.--Professional Rhetoricians
appear as Playwrights.--The School of Isocrates.--The _Centaur_ of
Chæremon.--His Style.--The _Themistocles_ of Moschion.--The Alexandrian
Pleiad.--The _Adonis_ of Ptolemy Philopator. Page 113
CHAPTER XVII.
_ANCIENT AND MODERN TRAGEDY._
Greek Tragedy and the Rites of Dionysus.--A Sketch of its Origin and
History.--The Attic Theatre.--The Actors and their Masks.--Relation
of Sculpture to the Drama in Greece.--The Legends used by the Attic
Tragedians.--Modern Liberty in the Choice of Subjects.--Mystery
Plays.--Nemesis.--Modern Tragedy has no Religious Idea.--Tragic
Irony.--Aristotle's Definition of Tragedy.--Modern Tragedy offers
no #katharsis# of the Passions.--Destinies and Characters.--Female
Characters.--The Supernatural.--French Tragedy.--Five
Acts.--Bloodshed.--The Unities.--Radical Differences in the Spirit of
Ancient and Modern Art. Page 145
CHAPTER XVIII.
_ARISTOPHANES._
Heine's Critique on Aristophanes.--Aristophanes as a Poet of the
Fancy.--The Nature of his Comic Grossness.--Greek Comedy in its
Relation to the Worship of Dionysus.--Greek Acceptance of the Animal
Conditions of Humanity.--His Burlesque, Parody, Southern Sense of
Fun.--Aristophanes and Menander.--His Greatness as a Poet.--Glimpses
of Pathos.--His Conservatism and Serious Aim.--Socrates, Agathon,
Euripides.--German Critics of Aristophanes.--Ancient and Modern
Comedy.--The _Birds_.--The _Clouds_.--Greek Youth and Education.--The
Allegories of Aristophanes.--The _Thesmophoriazusæ_.--Aristophanes and
Plato. Page 171
CHAPTER XIX.
_THE COMIC FRAGMENTS._
Three Periods in Attic History.--The Three Kinds of Comedy: Old,
Middle, New.--Approximation of Comedy to the Type of Tragedy.--Athenæus
as the Source of Comic Fragments.--Fragments of the Old Comedy.--Satire
on Women.--Parasites.--Fragments of the Middle Comedy.--Critique of
Plato and the Academic Philosophers.--Literary Criticism.--Passages
on Sleep and Death.--Attic Slang.--The Demi-monde.--Theophrastus
and the Later Rhetoricians.--Cooks and Cookery-books.--Difficulty
of Defining the Middle from the New Comedy.--Menander.--Sophocles
and Menander.--Epicureanism.--Menander's Sober Philosophy of
Life.--Goethe on Menander.--Philemon.--The Comedy of Manners culminated
in Menander.--What we mean by Modernism.--Points of Similarity and
Difference between Ancient and Modern Comedy.--The Freedom of Modern
Art. Page 216
CHAPTER XX.
_THE IDYLLISTS._
Theocritus: his Life.--The Canon of his Poems.--The Meaning of the
Word Idyl.--Bucolic Poetry in Greece, Rome, Modern Europe.--The
Scenery of Theocritus.--Relation of Southern Nature to Greek
Mythology and Greek Art.--Rustic Life and Superstitions.--Feeling
for Pure Nature in Theocritus.--How Distinguished from the same
Feeling in Modern Poets.--Galatea.--Pharmaceutria.--Hylas.--Greek
Chivalry.--The Dioscuri.--Thalysia.--Bion.--The Lament for
Adonis.--Moschus.--Europa.--Megara.--Lament for Bion.--The Debts of
Modern Poets to the Idyllists. Page 240
CHAPTER XXI.
_THE ANTHOLOGY._
The History of its Compilation.--Collections of Meleager, Philippus,
Agathias, Cephalas, Planudes.--The Palatine MS.--The Sections
of the Anthology.--Dedicatory Epigrams.--Simonides.--Epitaphs:
Real and Literary.--Callimachus.--Epigrams on Poets.--Antipater
of Sidon.--Hortatory Epigrams.--Palladas.--Satiric
Epigrams.--Lucillius.--Amatory Epigrams.--Meleager, Straton,
Philodemus, Antipater, Rufinus, Paulus Silentiarius, Agathias,
Plato.--Descriptive Epigrams. Page 281
CHAPTER XXII.
_HERO AND LEANDER._
Virgil's Mention of this Tale.--Ovid and Statius.--Autumnal
Poetry.--Confusion between the Mythical Musæus and the Grammarian.--The
Introduction of the Poem.--Analysis of the Story.--Hallam's Judgment
on Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_.--Comparison of Marlowe and
Musæus.--Classic and Romantic Art. Page 345
CHAPTER XXIII.
_THE GENIUS OF GREEK ART._
Separation between the Greeks and us.--Criticism.--Greek Sense of
Beauty.--Greek Morality.--Greece, Rome, Renaissance, the Modern Spirit.
Page 363
CHAPTER XXIV.
_CONCLUSION._
Sculpture, the Greek Art _par excellence_.--Plastic Character of the
Greek Genius.--Sterner Aspects of Greek Art.--Subordination of Pain
and Discord to Harmony.--Stoic-Epicurean Acceptance of Life.--Sadness
of Achilles in the _Odyssey_.--Endurance of Odysseus.--Myth of
Prometheus.--Sir H. S. Maine on Progress.--The Essential Relation of
all Spiritual Movement to Greek Culture.--Value of the Moral Attitude
of the Greeks for us.--Three Points of Greek Ethical Inferiority.--The
Conception of Nature.--The System of Marcus Aurelius.--Contrast
with the _Imitatio Christi_.--The Modern Scientific
Spirit.--Indestructible Elements in the Philosophy of Nature. Page 391
THE GREEK POETS.
CHAPTER XIV.
_GREEK TRAGEDY AND EURIPIDES._
Two Conditions for the Development of a National
Drama.--The Attic Audience.--The Persian War.--Nemesis
the Cardinal Idea of Greek Tragedy.--Traces of the
Doctrine of Nemesis in Early Greek Poetry.--The
Fixed Material of Greek Tragedy.--Athens in the
Age of Euripides.--Changes introduced by him in
Dramatic Art.--Law of Progress in all Art.--Æschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides.--The Treatment of #eupsychia#
by Euripides.--Menoikeus.--Death of Polyneices and
Eteocles.--Polyxena.--Iphigenia.--Medea.--Hippolytus.--Electra
and Orestes.--Lustspiele.--The _Andromache_.--The Dramas
of Orestes.--Friendship and Pylades.--Injustice done to
Euripides by Recent Critics.
The chapters on Æschylus and Sophocles have already introduced the
reader to some of the principal questions regarding Attic tragedy in
general. Yet the opening of a new volume justifies the resumption
of this subject from the beginning, while the peculiar position of
Euripides, in relation to his two great predecessors, suggests the
systematic discussion of the religious ideas which underlay this
supreme form of national art, as well as of the æsthetical rules which
it obeyed in Greece.
Critics who are contented with referring the origin of the Greek drama
to the mimetic instinct inherent in all humanity are apt to neglect
those circumstances which render it an almost unique phenomenon in
literature. If the mimetic instinct were all that is requisite for
the origination of a national drama, then we might expect to find that
every race at a certain period of its development produced both tragedy
and comedy. This, however, is far from being the case. A certain rude
mimesis, such as the acting of descriptive dances or the jesting of
buffoons and mummers, is indeed common in all ages and nations. But
there are only two races which can be said to have produced the drama
as a fine art originally and independently of foreign influences. These
are the Greeks and the Hindoos. With reference to the latter, it is
even questionable whether they would have composed plays so perfect as
their famous _Sakountala_ without contact with Hellenic civilization.
All the products of the modern drama, whether tragic or comic, must
be regarded as the direct progeny of the Greek stage. The habit of
play-acting, continued from Athens to Alexandria, and from Rome to
Byzantium, never wholly expired. The "Christus Patiens," attributed
to Gregory of Nazianzus, was an adaptation of the art of Euripides
to Christian story; and the representation of "Mysteries" during the
Middle Ages kept alive the dramatic tradition, until the discovery of
classic literature and the revival of taste in modern Europe led to the
great works of the English, Spanish, French, and subsequently of the
German theatre.
Something more than the mere instinct of imitation, therefore, caused
the Greeks to develop their drama. Like sculpture, like the epic,
the drama was one of the artistic forms through which the genius of
the Greek race expressed itself--by which, to use the language of
philosophical mysticism, it fulfilled its destiny as a prime agent
in the manifestation of the World-Spirit. In their realization of
that perfect work of art for which they seem to have been specially
ordained, the drama was no less requisite than sculpture and
architecture, than the epic, the ode, and the idyl.
Two conditions, both of which the Greeks enjoyed in full perfection at
the moment of their first dramatic energy, seem to be requisite for the
production of a great and thoroughly national drama. These are, first,
an era of intense activity or a period succeeding immediately to one
of excitement, by which the nation has been nobly agitated; secondly,
a public worthy of the dramatist spurring him on by its enthusiasm and
intelligence to the creation of high works of art. A glance at the
history of the drama in modern times will prove how necessary these
conditions are. It was the gigantic effort which we English people made
in our struggle with Rome and Spain, it was the rousing of our keenest
thought and profoundest emotion by the Reformation, which prepared us
for the Elizabethan drama, by far the greatest, next to the Greek, in
literature. The nation lived in action, and delighted to see great
actions imitated. Races in repose or servitude, like the Hebrews under
the Roman empire, may, in their state of spiritual exaltation and by
effort of pondering on the mysteries of God and man, give birth to
new theosophies; but it requires a free and active race, in which
young and turbulent blood is flowing, to produce a drama. In England,
again, at that time, there was a great public. All classes crowded to
the theatres. London, in whose streets and squares martyrs had been
burned, on whose quays the pioneers of the Atlantic and Pacific, after
disputing the Indies with Spain, lounged and enjoyed their leisure,
supplied an eager audience, delighting in the dreams of poets which
recalled to mind the realities of their own lives, appreciating the
passion of tragedy, enjoying the mirth of comic incident. The men
who listened to _Othello_ had both done and suffered largely; their
own experience was mirrored in the scenes of blood and struggle set
before them. These two things, therefore--the awakening of the whole
English nation to activity, and the presence of a free and haughty
audience--made our drama great.
In the Spanish drama only one of the requisite conditions was
fulfilled--activity. Before they began to write plays the Spaniards had
expelled the Moors, discovered the New World, and raised themselves to
the first place among European nations. But there was not the same free
audience in Spain as in England. Papal despotism and the tyranny of the
court checked and coerced the drama, so that, with all its richness and
imaginative splendor, the Spanish theatre is inferior to the English.
The French drama suffered still more from the same kind of restriction.
Subject to the canons of scholastic pedants, tied down to an imitation
of the antique, made to reflect the manners and sentiments of a highly
artificial court, animated by the sympathies of no large national
audience, the French playwrights became courtiers, artists obedient
to the pleasures of a king--not, like the dramatists of Greece and
England, the prophets of the people, the leaders of a chorus triumphant
and rejoicing in its mighty deeds.
Italy has no real theatre. In Italy there has been no stirring of a
national, united spirit; no supreme and central audience; no sudden
consciousness of innate force and freedom in the sovereign people.
The requisite conditions have always failed. The German drama, both
by its successes and shortcomings, illustrates the same position.
Such greatness as it achieved in Goethe and Schiller it owed to the
fermentation of German nationality, to the so-called period of "storm
and stress" which electrified the intellects of Germany and made the
Germans eager to assert their manhood among nations. But listen to
Goethe complaining that there was no public to receive his works;
study the petty cabals of Weimar; estimate the imitative and laborious
spirit of German art, and it is clear why Germany produced but
scattered and imperfect results in the drama.
The examples of England, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, all tend
to prove that for the creation of a drama it is necessary that the
condition of national activity should be combined with the condition of
a national audience--not an audience of courtiers or critics or learned
persons. In Greece, both of these conditions were united in unrivalled
and absolute perfection. While in England, during the Elizabethan
period, the public which crowded our theatres were uncultivated, and
formed but a small portion of the free nation they represented, in
Athens the people, collectively and in a body, witnessed the dramatic
shows provided for them in the theatre of Bacchus. The same set of men,
when assembled in the Pnyx, constituted the national assembly; and
in that capacity made laws, voted supplies, declared wars, ratified
alliances, ruled the affairs of dependent cities. In a word, they were
Athens. Every man among them--by intercourse with the greatest spirits
of the Greek world in the agora and porches of the wrestling-grounds,
by contemplation of the sculptures of Pheidias, by familiarity with
Eleusinian processions, by participation in solemn sacrifices and
choric dances, by listening to the recitations of Homer, by attendance
on the lectures of the sophists, by debates in the ecclesia, by
pleadings in the law-courts--had been multifariously educated and
rendered capable of appreciating the subtleties of rhetoric and
argument, as well as of comprehending the æsthetical beauty with
which a Greek play was enriched. It is easy to imagine the influence
which this potent, multitudinous, and highly cultivated audience must
have exercised over the dramatists, and what an impulse it must have
communicated to their genius. In England the playwright and the actor
were both looked down upon with pity or contempt; they wrote and acted
for money in private speculations, and in rivalry with several petty
theatres. In Athens the tragedian was honored. Sophocles was elected a
general with Pericles, and a member of the provisional government after
the dissolution of the old democracy. The actor, too, was respected.
The State itself defrayed the expenses of the drama, and no ignoble
competition was possible between tragedian and tragedian, since all
exhibited their plays to the same audience, in the same sacred theatre,
and all were judged by the same judges.
The critical condition of the Greek people itself at the epoch of the
drama is worth minute consideration. During the two previous centuries,
the whole of Hellas had received a long and careful education: at the
conclusion came the terrible convulsion of the Persian war. After
the decay of the old monarchies, the Greek states seethed for years
in the process of dissolution and reconstruction. The colonies had
been founded. The aristocratic families had striven with the mob in
every city; and from one or the other power at times tyrants had risen
to control both parties and oppress the commonwealth. Out of these
political disturbances there gradually arose a sense of law, a desire
for established constitutions. There emerged at last the prospect
of political and social stability. Meanwhile, in all departments of
art and literature, the Greeks had been developing their genius.
Lyrical, satirical, and elegiac poetry had been carried to perfection.
The Gnomic poets and the Seven Sages had crystallized morality in
apothegms. Philosophy had taken root in the colonies. Sculpture had
almost reached its highest point. The Greek games, practised through
nearly three hundred years, had created a sense of national unity. It
seemed as if all the acquirements and achievements of the race had
been spread abroad to form a solid and substantial base for some most
comprehensive superstructure. Then, while Hellas was at this point of
magnificent but still incomplete development, there followed, first,
the expulsion of the Peisistratids from Athens, which aroused the
spirit of that mighty nation, and then the invasion of Xerxes, which
electrified the whole Greek world. It was this that inflamed the genius
of Greece; this transformed the race of thinkers, poets, artists,
statesmen, into a race of heroes, actors in the noblest sense of the
word. The struggle with Persia, too, gave to Athens her right place.
Assuming the hegemony of Hellas, to which she was fore-destined by her
spiritual superiority, she flashed in the supreme moment which followed
the battle of Salamis into the full consciousness of her own greatness.
It was now, when the Persian war had made the Greeks a nation of
soldiers, and had placed the crown on Athens, that the drama--that form
of art which combines all kinds of poetry in one, which subordinates
sculpture, painting, architecture, music, dancing, to its own use, and
renders all arts subservient to the one end of action--appeared in its
colossal majesty upon the Attic stage.
At this point of history the drama was a necessary product. The
forces which had given birth to all the other forms of art were still
exuberant and unexhausted, needing their completion. At the same time,
nothing but the impassioned presentation of humanity in action could
possibly have satisfied the men who had themselves enacted on the
plains and straits of Attica the greatest and most artistic drama of
real history. It was one of the chief actors of Marathon and Salamis
who composed the _Prometheus_, and personated his own hero on the stage.
If we proceed to analyze the cardinal idea of Greek tragedy, we shall
again observe the close connection which exists between the drama
and the circumstances of the people at the time of its production.
Schlegel, in his _Lectures on the Drama_, defines the prevailing
idea of Greek tragedy to be the sense of an oppressive destiny--a
fate against which the will of man blindly and vainly dashes. This
conception of hereditary destiny seems to be strongly illustrated by
many plays. Orestes, Oedipus, Antigone, are unable to escape their
doom. Beautiful human heroism and exquisite innocence are alike
sacrificed to the fatality attending an accursed house. Yet Schlegel
has not gone far enough in his analysis. He has not seen that this
inflexible fate is set in motion by a superior and anterior power, that
it operates in the service of offended justice. When Oedipus slays his
father, he does so in contempt of oracular warnings. Orestes, haunted
by the Furies, has a mother's blood upon his hands, and unexpiated
crimes of father and of grandsire to atone for. Antigone, the best of
daughters and most loving of sisters, dies miserably, not dogged by
Fate, but having of her own free will exposed her life in obedience to
the pure laws of the heart. It is impossible to suppose that a Greek
would have been satisfied with the bald fate-theory of Schlegel. Not
fate, but Nemesis, was the ruling notion in Greek tragedy. A profound
sense of the divine government of the world, of a righteous power
punishing pride and vice, pursuing the children of the guilty to the
tenth generation, but showing mercy to the contrite--in short, a
mysterious and almost Jewish ideal of offended holiness pervades the
whole work of the tragedians. This religious conception had gradually
defined itself in the consciousness of the Greek race. Homer in both
his epics presents us with the spectacle of crime punished. It is the
sin of Paris and the obstinacy of the Trojan princes which lead to the
fall of Troy. It is the insolence of the suitors in the _Odyssey_ which
brings them to their death. The Cyclical poets seem to have dwelt on
the same theme. The storm which fell on the Achaian fleet, dispersing
or drowning the heroes, was a punishment for their impiety and pride
during the sack of Troy. The madness of Ajax followed his violence upon
Cassandra. When conscious morality begins in Greece the idea is at once
made prominent. Hesiod continually insists on justice, whose law no man
may violate unpunished. The Gnomic poets show how guilt, if unavenged
at the moment, brings calamity upon the offspring of the evil-doer.
This notion of an inheritance of crime is particularly noticeable,
since it tinged the whole tragedy of the Greeks. Solon, again, in his
dialogue with Croesus, develops another aspect of the same idea. With
him the Deity is jealous of all towering greatness, of all insolent
prosperity; his Nemesis punishes the pride of wealth and the lust of
life. Some of the most prominent personages of Greek tragedy--Creon,
Oedipus, Theseus, Agamemnon--illustrate this phase of the idea. In the
sayings of the Seven Sages we trace another shade of the conception.
All of them insist on moderation, modesty, the right proportion, the
due mean. The lyrists take up a somewhat different position. The
vicissitudes of life, both independent of and connected with personal
guilt, fascinate their imagination. They have a deep and awful sense
of sudden catastrophes. Pindar rises to a loftier level: his odes are
pervaded by reverence for a holy power, before whom the insolent are
forced to bow, by whom the humble are protected and the good rewarded.
Such are the traces of a doctrine of Nemesis to be found in all the
literature of the pre-dramatic period. That very event which determined
the sudden splendor of the drama gave a sublime and terrific sanction
to the already existing morality. The Persian war exhibited the
downfall of a haughty and insolent race, cut off in all its pomp and
power. Before the eyes of the men who witnessed the calamities of
Oedipus and Agamemnon on the stage, the glory of godless Asia had
vanished like a dream. Thus the idea of Nemesis quelling the insolent
and smiting the unholy was realized in actual history; and to add to
the impression produced on Greek imagination by the destruction of the
Persian hosts, Pheidias carved his statue of Nemesis to be a monument
in enduring marble of the national morality. Æschylus erected an even
more majestic monument to the same principle in his tragedies.[1]
Nemesis is the fundamental idea of the Greek drama. It appears
strongest in Æschylus, as a prophetic and awful law, mysteriously felt
and terribly revealed. Sophocles uses it to point the deep moralities
which govern human life. In Euripides it degenerates into something
more akin to a sense of vicissitudes; it becomes more sentimental--less
a religious or moral principle than a phenomenon inspiring fear and
pity. This sequence appears to be necessary in the growth and expansion
of a primitive idea. Rugged and superstitious at first, it is next
harmonized and humanized, and ends at last in being merely artistic.
In Æschylus the fundamental moral law of Nemesis, as a part of the
divine government of the world, is set forth in three distinct
manifestations. We find it expressed mythologically, as abstract
and ideal, in the _Prometheus_. The offence of Prometheus against
Zeus, though unselfish and generous, must be expiated by suffering;
the rebellious demi-god must be brought at last to merge his will
in that of Zeus, to bind his brows with the willow of submission,
and to place upon his finger the iron ring of necessity. We find it
expressed typically, as still ideal and almost superhuman, in the
_Oresteia_. Here a whole family is vitiated by the offence of their
first ancestor. The hereditary curse is renewed and fortified from
generation to generation, by the sins of the children, until at last
a reconciliation is effected between the purifying deities and the
infernal powers of vengeance. In the _Persæ_ the same law is exhibited
as a fact of contemporary history. It is no longer a matter of
mythology, as in the _Prometheus_, or a matter of heroic legend, as in
the _Oresteia_, but a matter of actual experience, that the godless
man should suffer and involve the innocent in his disaster. Thus the
law of Nemesis is displayed as an eternal verity in the _Prometheus_;
and in the _Oresteia_ it is actualized and humanized within the region
of heroic legend; in the _Persæ_ it is used for the explanation of
every-day events. The pedigree of inherited crime and vengeance, as
explained in the choruses of the _Oresteia_, and as illustrated by the
whole history of the Tantalidæ, is this.[2] The pride of wealth in the
first instance swells the heart, and inclines its possessor to ungodly
thoughts. This leads to impiety (#to dyssebes#), and in the energetic
language of the _Agamemnon_[3] the arrogant man kicks with his heel
against the altar of Justice. A state of presumptuous insolence
(#hybris#) is the result of the original unholiness. And now the man,
who has been corrupted in his soul, is ready for the commission of
some signal crime. Ate, or a blindness of the reason, which prevents
him from foreseeing the consequences of his acts, is the child of this
presumption. Inspired by Ate, he sheds the blood of his brother, or
defiles his sister's bed; and from this moment the seed is sown which
will spring up and breed fresh mischief for each successive generation.
After the spilling of blood the affair passes into the hands of the
Erinnyes, whose business it is to beset the house of the guilty doer.
They form the bloody revel, which, though glutted with gore, refuse to
quit the palace of Atreus. They leap upon it from above, and rack it
like a tempest. Yet from their power there is escape. The curse of the
house works; but it works only through the impure. Should a man arise
capable of seeing rightly and living purely, he may work off the curse
and become free. Such a man was Orestes. The leading thought in this
system of morality is that pride begets impiety, impiety produces an
insolent habit of mind, which culminates in blindness; the fruit of
this blindness is crime, breeding crime from sire to son. It is only
when the righteous man appears, who performs an act of retributive
justice, in obedience to divine mandates, and without the indulgence of
any selfish passion, that the curse is stayed.
Such is a crude sketch of the Æschylean theory of Nemesis, as set
forth in the great trilogy. To Æschylus, the presentation of the moral
law conceived by him is of even more importance than the exhibition
of the characters of men controlled by it. This is not the case with
Sophocles. He fixes our attention upon the #hamartia#, or error of the
guilty man, interests us in the qualities by which he was betrayed into
sin, and makes us feel that suffering is the inevitable consequence of
arrogant or wilful acts. The weakness of the offender is more prominent
in Sophocles than the vengeance of the outraged deity. Thus, although
there is the sternest religious background to all the tragedies of
Sophocles, our attention is always fixed upon the humanity of his
heroes. The house of Labdacus is involved in hereditary guilt. Laius,
despising an oracle, begets a son by Jocasta, and is slain by that
son. Oedipus, in his youthful recklessness, careless of oracular
warnings, kills his father and weds his mother. Jocasta, through her
levity and impiety, is hurried into marriage with the murderer of her
husband, who is also her own son. All this #authadia#, or headstrong
wilfulness, is punished by the descent of a fearful plague on Thebes;
and Oedipus, whose heat of temper and self-reliance are his only
serious crime, is overpowered by the abyss of misery into which these
faults have plunged his people and his family. The utter prostration
of Oedipus--when his eyes have been opened to the tissue of horrors he
has woven round himself, his mother, his nation, and his children--is
the first step in his moral discipline. He abdicates in favor of the
insolent Creon, and goes forth to wander, an abhorred and helpless
blind man, on the face of the earth. When, at the conclusion of his
pariah life, the citizens of Colonus refuse him harborage, he only
cries: "My deeds were rather sufferings than crimes." His old heroic
haughtiness and headstrong will are tempered to a noble abhorrence of
all baseness, to a fiery indignation. He has been purged and lessoned
to humility before the throne of Zeus. Therefore, in return for his
self-annihilation, the gods at last receive him to their company, and
constitute him a blessed dæmon in the place of his disgrace. It was
the highest triumph of tragic art to exhibit that new phase in the
character of Oedipus which marks the conclusion of the _Tyrannus_ and
is sustained in the _Colonëus_. In both of these plays, Oedipus is
the same man; but circumstances have so wrought upon his temper as to
produce a great change. Still, the change is only commensurate with
the force of the circumstances. We comprehend it, while at the same
time we are forced to marvel at the profound skill of the poet, who,
in the first tragedy, has presented to our eyes the hot-tempered king
reduced to abject humiliation, and in the second has shown us the same
man dignified, and purified by the dealings of the heavy hand of God.
Set aside by his calamity, and severed from the common lot of men,
Oedipus has submitted to the divine will and has communed with unseen
powers. He is therefore now environed with a treble mystery--with the
mystery of his awful past, the mystery of his god-conducted present,
the mystery of his august future. It was by such masterly delineation
of character that Sophocles threw the old Æschylean dogma of Nemesis
into the background, and moralized his tragedy without sacrificing an
iota of its religious force. Aristotle, speaking of the highest tragic
art, says that its object is to represent an #êthos#, a permanent habit
of moral temper. Careless or bad art allows impossible incongruities
in the delineation of character, whereas the true poet maintains
identity throughout. If this be so, Sophocles deserves the title of
#êthikôtatos# in the very highest sense. As a further illustration of
the divergence of Sophocles from the Æschylean dogma of Nemesis, it
is worth while to mention the _Antigone_. This play takes us beyond
the region of hereditary guilt into the sphere of moral casuistry;
its tragic interest depends not upon the evolution of an ancestral
curse, although Antigone is incidentally involved in the crime of her
brothers, but upon the conflict of duties in a single heart. Antigone,
while obeying the law of her conscience, is disobeying the command of
her sovereign. She acted rightly; yet her offence was sufficient to
cause her legal death, and this death she chose with open eyes. It is
in the person of Creon that the old moral of Nemesis is drawn. Like
Oedipus, he treats the warnings of Teiresias with scorn, and persists
in his criminal persecution of the dead Polyneices. Shaken at last
by the seer's vaticinations, he rescinds his orders, but too late.
Antigone has hanged herself in prison; Hæmon curses his father, and
stabs himself upon her corpse; Eurydice, maddened with grief, puts an
end to her own life; and thus the house of the tyrant is left unto him
desolate. It is quite impossible by any phrases of mere criticism to
express the admiration which every student of Sophocles must feel for
the profundity of his design, for the unity of his art, and for the
firmness with which he has combined the essential religious doctrines
of Greek tragedy with his own ethical philosophy.
In passing to Euripides we feel how much we have lost. The religious
foundation has been broken up; the clear intuitive morality of
Sophocles has been exchanged for sophistry, debate, hypothesis, and
paradox. In the delineation of character he wavers; not because he
could not create well-sustained types, since Medea, Hippolytus, and
many other Euripidean personages display sublime and massive unity; but
because, apparently owing to the rapid development of the dramatic art
and the speculative ferment of the age in which he lived, he was more
interested in the creation of plots and situations, in the discussion
of vexed questions, and in the critical rehandling of apparently
exhausted motives, than in the exhibition of the truly tragic #êthos#.
The praise bestowed on him by Aristotle as being #tragikôtatos#, proves
that his contemporaries had recognized this source of both his weakness
and his strength.
While considering the work done by the three great tragic authors, we
must not forget that the Greek dramatists adhered to a fixed body of
legends; the tales of the House of Atreus, of Troy, of the family of
Laius at Thebes, of Herakles, of Jason, and of Theseus, formed the
staple of the plays of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. This fact
helps to account for the early decline of the Greek drama. It was
impossible for the successors of Æschylus and Sophocles to surpass
them in the heroic treatment of the same mythical motives. Yet custom
and tradition, the religious antecedents of tragedy, the cumbrous
apparatus of mask and buskin and Bacchic robe, the conventional
chorus, the very size of the theatre, the whole form, in fact, of Greek
dramatic art, rendered a transition from the heroic to the romantic
tragedy impossible. Those fixed legends which Æschylus had used as the
framework for his religious philosophy of Nemesis and Ate, from which
Sophocles had drawn deep lessons of morality, had to be employed by
Euripides as best he might. On their firmly traced, inflexible outlines
he embroidered his own work of pathos and imagination, losing sight
of the divine element, blurring morality, but producing a world of
fanciful yet living shapes of sentiment and thought and passion.
If we seek to comprehend the position of Euripides in relation to
his predecessors, we must consider the changes which had taken place
in Athens between the period of the Persian war and that in which
he flourished. All the mutations of Greek history were accomplished
with celerity; but in this space of less than half a century the rate
of progress was nothing less than marvellous, and the evolution of
the Attic drama through its three great tragedians was accomplished
with a rapidity which is quite miraculous. Æschylus gained his first
prize in 484 B.C., Sophocles his first in 468 B.C., Euripides his
first in 441 B.C. The _Medea_ of Euripides, a play which exhibits
all the innovations of its author, appeared in 431 B.C. Therefore a
period of fifty-three years sufficed for the complete development of
the greatest work of art the world has ever witnessed. The history
of our own stage offers a parallel to this extraordinary rapidity of
growth. Marlowe produced his _Tamburlaine_ in 1590, Ford his _Lover's
Melancholy_ in 1628: between these two dates--that is to say, within
the compass of thirty-eight years--were composed all the plays of
Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger,
Webster, Heywood, Decker, Marston, Chapman, Middleton, and others whom
it would be tedious to mention. Halliwell's _Dictionary of Old English
Plays_ contains two hundred and eighty closely printed pages; yet
very few of the pieces he enumerates are subsequent to what we call
Elizabethan. But, though our drama, in respect of fertility, offers a
parallel to that of Athens, we can show no three poets of paramount
genius corresponding to Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, each of
whom would have been sufficient by himself to mark a century in the
growth of the genius of his nation. Between Æschylus and Sophocles
there is a wide chasm in religion, politics, and art; between Sophocles
and Euripides, again, there is a chasm in religion, politics, art, and
philosophy. Yet Sophocles, after superseding Æschylus, lived to put on
mourning for the death of Euripides. Some of the men of Marathon yet
remained when Aristophanes was writing, both to point his moral against
Euripides, and also to prove by contrast with the generation that had
grown up since how impossible it was for the poet of the present to vie
with the Æschylus of the past. In the first place, Athens had become
the centre of progressive thought. Teachers of rhetoric and reasoning
made her wrestling-grounds and gardens the scene of their disputes and
lectures. The arts of eloquence were studied by the youth who in a
previous age had been contented with Homer. At Athens, Anaxagoras had
questioned the divinity of Helios, and had asserted reason to be the
moving force of the universe. Sophists who taught the arts of life for
money, and philosophers who subjected morals to ingenious analysis,
and explained away on scientific principles the ancient myths of Greek
nature-worship, combined to disturb ethical and religious traditions.
A more solid, because more reasoned, morality was springing up perhaps.
A purer monotheism was being inculcated. But meanwhile the old Hellenic
customs and the fabric of mythic theology were undermined. It could not
be but that the poet of the day should participate in these changes.
In the second place, the Athenian populace had grown to be supreme in
two departments--the high parliament of State and the law-courts. Every
Athenian was now far more than formerly an orator or judge of orators,
an advocate or judge of advocates. Two passions possessed the popular
mind: the passion for the assembly with its stormy debate and pompous
declamation; the passion for the dikastery with its personal interests,
its problems of casuistical law, its momentous tragedies of private
life, its studied eloquence. Talking and listening were the double
function of an Athenian citizen. To speak well on every subject, so as
to gain causes in the courts, and to persuade the people in the Pnyx;
to criticise speeches with acumen, so as not to be deluded by specious
arguments: these were the prime accomplishments of an Athenian youth of
promise. It is obvious that a very peculiar audience was thus formed
for the tragedian--an audience greedy of intellectual subtleties, of
pathetic situations, of splendid oratory, of clever reasoning--an
audience more appreciative of the striking than the true, of the novel
than the natural. In the third place, the Athenians had waxed delicate
and wanton since the Persian war. When Æschylus began to write,
the peril of utter ruin hung like a stone of Tantalus over Hellas.
That removed, the Greeks breathed freely. The Athenians, growing in
wealth and power, neglected the old moderation of their ancestors.
Youths who in earlier days would have fared hardly now drove their
chariots, backed their fighting-cocks, and followed their own sweet
will. Aristotle quaintly enough observes that the flute had become
fashionable after the expulsion of the Persians. The poet of the day
could no longer be austere like Æschylus or sedate like Sophocles.
In all these changes Euripides partook. The pupil in rhetoric of
Prodicus, in philosophy of Anaxagoras and Heraclitus, a book-collector,
a student of painting, the friend of Socrates, cultivated in all
innovations of morality and creed, Euripides belonged essentially to
his own day. As far as a tragic dramatist can be the mouthpiece of
his age, Euripides was the mouthpiece of Athenian decline. For this
reason, because he so exactly expressed the feelings and opinions of
his time, which feelings and opinions produced a permanent national
habit of mind, Euripides became the darling of posterity. Æschylus was
the Titanic product of a bygone period; Sophocles displayed the pure
and perfect ideal; but Euripides was the artist who, without improving
on the spirit of his age, gave it a true and adequate expression. The
only wonder is that during his lifetime Euripides was not more popular
at Athens. His comparative neglect proves him to have been somewhat in
advance of his century, and justifies Aristophanes in the reproach that
he anticipated the Athenians in the break-up of their forms of thought.
At this point we may consider the condition of the tragic art when
Euripides took it up as the business of his life. Though tragedy, as
formed by Æschylus, represented one true and important aspect of Greek
thought--the religious--yet it could never have been adequate to the
life of the whole nation in the same degree as the many-sided drama
of Shakespeare, for example, was to that of our Elizabethan ancestors.
Its regularity and solemnity tended to make it an ideal work of art. It
might arouse the religious feeling, the national pride, the enthusiasm
for a legendary past, which were so powerful among the Athenians of the
Marathonian epoch. But it could not have had much attraction for the
Athenians of the Syracusan expedition. As men subject to the divine
rule, indeed, it had a message fraught with meaning for them; but as
Athenians of to-day it did not touch them. We can well believe that
this lofty, ceremonious art fatigued a large portion of the Attic
audience. After having listened to some seventy plays of Æschylus
and fifty of Sophocles, not to mention Phrynichus and Choerilus, and
scores of minor dramatists, all teaching the same religious morality,
and all obeying the same æsthetic principles, we can conceive that
a merry Greek began to long for novelty. It must have required the
supreme genius of a Sophocles to sustain the attention of the audience
at its ancient altitude. In the hands of inferior poets, the tragic
commonplaces must have appeared insipid. Some change seemed absolutely
necessary. Euripides, a poet of very distinguished originality, saw
that he must adapt his dramatic style to the new requirements of his
audience, and give them what they liked, even though it were not good
for them. The sophistic arguments, the strained situations, the
law-court pleadings, the pathetic touches, the meretricious lyrics, the
philosophical explanations, the sententious epigrams, the theatrical
effects, which mar his tragedies, were deliberate innovations on the
old pure style. Euripides had determined to bring tragedy home to the
hearts and understandings of the spectators. All the peculiarities
of his art flow from this one aim. This is the secret of what may be
described as his romantic realism, his twofold appeal to sympathy by
the invention of startling incident and by the faithful delineation of
vulgar life and common character. Whether he did not pursue this aim on
a false method, whether he might not have aroused the sympathies of his
audience without debasing tragedy, remains a fit matter for debate.
Entirely to eliminate the idea of Nemesis, which gave its character
to Greek tragedy, was what Euripides, had he been so inclined, could
hardly have succeeded in effecting. Though he never impresses on
our minds the dogma of an avenging deity, like Æschylus, or of an
inevitable law, like Sophocles, he makes us feel the chance and change
of human life, the helplessness of man, the stormy sea of passions,
sorrows, and vicissitudes on which the soul is tossed. Conventional
phrases about moderation in all things, retributive justice, and the
like, are used to keep up the old tragic form. In this way he brought
tragedy down to the level of real life, wherein we do not trace the
visible finger of Providence, but where all seems at least confusion
to the natural eye. Euripides no more than Shakespeare sought to be a
prophet or interpreter of the divine operations. In the same spirit he
treated his materials with freedom. Adhering conventionally, and as a
form of art, to the mythical legends of Hellas--that charmed circle
beyond which the tragic muse had never strayed--he adapted them to
his own purposes. He gave new characters to the principal heroes,[4]
mixed up legendary incidents with trivial domestic scenes, lowered
the language of demigods to current Greek talk, hazarded occasional
scepticism, and introduced familiar phrases into ceremonious debates.
The sacred character of the myths disappeared; Euripides used them as
so many masses of entertaining folklore and fiction, fit for tragic
handling. In some instances, as, for example, in the _Ion_ and the
ending of the _Hippolytus_, he may even have intended an attack upon
the ethics they had sanctioned. When we hear Achilles and Orestes
talking like Athenian citizens, wrangling, perorating, subtilizing,
seeking victory in strife of words, trifling with questions of
profoundest import, and settling moral problems by verbal quibbles,
we understand the remark of Sophocles that he had painted men as
they ought to be, Euripides as they are. Medea and Alcestis are not
the mythical Medea or the legendary queen of Pheræ, but an injured
wife, and a devoted wife, just such as Shakespeare or Balzac might
have depicted. Menelaus is invariably a faint-hearted, smooth-spoken,
treasonable, uxorious, vain man. Only in the _Helena_, when fairly
driven to bay, does he show the pluck of a soldier. Nothing can be
more contemptible than the Agamemnon of _Iphigenia in Aulide_. He is a
feeble, double-minded dastard, who has aspired to the commandership in
chief from motives of vulgar ambition, and who finds himself unable to
hold his own against cabal and mutiny. This is perhaps a development of
the Homeric conception, but with all the Homeric radiance, the dignity
that shields a monarch from disgrace, omitted. But unfortunately
for this attempt to make Greek tragedy more real and living, more
representative of the actual world, the cothurnus, the mask, the
chorus, the thymelé, the gigantic stage, remained. All the cumbrous
paraphernalia of the Æschylean theatre environed the men and women of
Euripides, who cut but a poor figure in the garb of demigods. In trying
to adapt the mould of Greek tragedy to real life, Euripides overpassed
the limits of possibility. The mould broke in his hands.
The same inevitable divergence from the Æschylean system is observable
in every department of the tragedy of Euripides. While Sophocles
had diminished the direct interposition of mysterious agencies, so
frequently invoked by Æschylus, and had interested his audience in
human character controlled and tempered by an unseen will of God,
Euripides went further. With him the affairs of life are no longer
based upon a firm foundation of divine law, but gods intervene
mechanically and freakishly, like the magicians in Ariosto or Tasso.[5]
Their agency is valuable, not as determining the moral conduct of the
personages, but as an exhibition of supernatural power which brings
about a sudden revolution of events. Independently of their miraculous
activity, the human agents display all varieties of character: every
shade of virtue and vice is delicately portrayed; pathetic scenes are
multiplied; the tendernesses of domestic life are brought prominently
forward; mixed motives and conflicting passions are skilfully analyzed.
Consequently the plays of Euripides are more rich in stirring incidents
than those of his predecessors. What we lose in gravity and unity is
made up for by versatility. Euripides, to use a modern phrase, is more
sensational than either Æschylus or Sophocles. Aristotle called him
#tragikôtatos#, by which he probably meant that he was most profuse of
touching and exciting scenes.
The same tendencies strike us in the more formal department of
the tragic art. Here, as elsewhere, Euripides moves a step beyond
Sophocles, breaking the perfection of poetic harmony for the sake of
novelty and effect. Euripides condescended to stage tricks. It is
well known how Aristophanes laughed at him for the presentation of
shabby-genteel princes and monarchs out-at-elbow.[6] Having no deep
tragic destiny for the groundwork of his drama, he sought to touch
the spectators by royalty in ruins and wealth reduced to beggary.
The gorgeous scenic shows in which Æschylus had delighted, but which
he had invariably subordinated to his subject, and which Sophocles,
with the tact of a supreme master in beauty, had managed to dispense
with, were lavished by Euripides. One play of his, the _Troades_, has
absolutely no plot. Such attraction as it possesses it owes to the
rapid succession of pathetic situations and splendid scenes, the whole
closing with the burning of the towers of Troy.
By curtailing the function of the Chorus, Euripides separated from the
action of the drama that element which in Æschylus had been chiefly
useful for the inculcation of the moral of the play. On the other hand,
by expanding the function of the Messenger he was able to indulge his
faculty for brilliant description. It has been well said, that the ear
and not the eye was the chosen vehicle of pathos to the Greeks. This
remark is fully justified by the narrative passages in the plays of
Euripides--passages of poetry unsurpassed for radiance, swiftness,
strength, pictorial effect. The account of the Bacchic revels among the
mountains of Cithæron, and of the death of Pentheus in the _Bacchæ_,
that of the death of Glauke in _Medea_, and of Hippolytus in the play
that bears his name, that of the sacrifice of Polyxena in the _Hecuba_,
that of Orestes and Pylades laying hands on Helen in the _Orestes_,
and many others, prove with what consummate skill the third of the
great tragic poets seized upon a field within the legitimate province
of his art as yet but imperfectly occupied by his predecessors.
Another novelty was the use of the prologue. Here, again, Euripides
expanded the already existing elements in Greek tragedy beyond their
power of enduring the strain he put upon them. In their drama the
Greek poets did not aim at surprise; the spectators were expected to
be familiar beforehand with the subject of the play. But when the
plot became more complicated and the incidents more varied under the
hands of Euripides, a prologue was the natural expedient, in perfect
harmony with the stationary character of Greek tragedy, for placing the
audience at the point of view intended by the poets.
The solution of the tragic situation by the intervention of a god at
the conclusion of the play, familiarly known as the _deus ex machinâ_,
was too frequently adopted by Euripides. The speeches of these divine
beings are always formal and uninteresting. Their interference is felt
to be mechanical, and the settlement of human difficulties effected by
them leaves an ineffaceable impression of littleness. It reminds us of
that pinch of dust upon the warring hive which Virgil described with
exquisite irony. The _deus ex machinâ_ existed potentially in previous
Greek tragedy, and Euripides is less to be blamed for the employment of
this device than for the abuse of it. He did not take enough pains to
prepare for the appearance of the deity by dramatic motives, and he had
recourse to it too often. It is probable that the theatrical effect
gratified his audience, and prevented them from calling in question the
artistic justification of so novel and exciting a stage spectacle.
In all these changes it will be evident that Euripides, wisely or
unwisely, obtained originality by carrying his art beyond the point
which it had reached under his predecessors. Using a simile, we might
compare the drama of Æschylus to the sublime but rugged architecture
which is called Norman, that of Sophocles to the most refined and
perfect pointed style, that of Euripides to a highly decorated--florid
and flamboyant--manner. Æschylus aimed at durability of structure, at
singleness and grandeur of effect. Sophocles added the utmost elegance
and finish. Euripides neglected force of construction and unity of
design for ornament and brilliancy of effect. But he added something of
his own, something infinitely precious and enduringly attractive. The
fault of his style consisted in a too exclusive attention to the parts.
We are also often made to feel that he fails by not concentrating his
whole strength upon the artistic motives of his plays. He has too many
side-thrusts at political and ethical questions, too many speculative
and critical digressions, too much logomachy and metaphysical debate.
The object of the foregoing remarks has been to show how and to
what extent Euripides departed from the form and essence of Greek
tragedy. It may sound paradoxical now to assert that it was a merit
in him rather than a defect to have sacrificed the unity of art to
the development of subordinate beauties. Yet it seems to me that in
no other way could the successor of Æschylus and Sophocles have made
himself the true exponent of his age, have expanded to the full the
faculties still latent in Greek tragedy, or have failed to "affect
the fame of an imitator." The law of inevitable progression in art,
from the severe and animated embodiment of an idea to the conscious
elaboration of merely æsthetic motives and brilliant episodes, has
hitherto been neglected by the critics and historians of poetry. They
do not observe that the first impulse in a people towards creativeness
is some deep and serious emotion, some fixed point of religious
enthusiasm or national pride. To give adequate form to this taxes the
energies of the first generation of artists, and raises their poetic
faculty, by the admixture of prophetic inspiration, to the highest
pitch. After the original passion for the ideas to be embodied in art
has somewhat subsided, but before the glow and fire of enthusiasm have
faded out, there comes a second period, when art is studied more for
art's sake, but when the generative potency of the earlier poets is
by no means exhausted. For a moment the artist at this juncture is
priest, prophet, hierophant, and charmer, all in one. More conscious
of the laws of beauty than his predecessors, he makes some sacrifice
of the idea to meet the requirements of pure art; but he never forgets
that beauty by itself is insufficient to a great and perfect work, nor
has he lost his interest in the cardinal conceptions which vitalize
the most majestic poetry. During the first and second phases which
I have indicated, the genius of a nation throws out a number of
masterpieces--some of them rough-hewn and Cyclopean, others perfect in
their combination of the strength of thought with grace and elevated
beauty. But the mine of ideas is exhausted. The national taste has
been educated. Conceptions which were novel to the grandparents have
become the intellectual atmosphere of the grandchildren. It is now
impossible to return upon the past--to gild the refined gold, or to
paint the lily of the supreme poets. Their vigor may survive in their
successors; but their inspiration has taken form forever in their
poems. What, then, remains for the third generation of artists?
They have either to reproduce their models--and this is stifling to
true genius; or they have to seek novelty at the risk of impairing
the strength or the beauty which has become stereotyped. Less deeply
interested in the great ideas by which they have been educated, and
of which they are in no sense the creators, incapable of competing on
the old ground with their elders, they are obliged to go afield for
striking situations, to force sentiment and pathos, to subordinate the
harmony of the whole to the melody of the parts, to sink the prophet in
the poet, the hierophant in the charmer.
This law of sequence is widely applicable. It will be seen to control
the history of all uninterrupted artistic dynasties. Greek sculpture,
for example, passes from the austere, through the perfect, to the
simply elegant. The artist of the Æginetan pediment was wholly intent
upon the faithful representation of heroic incidents. The event
filled his mind: he sought to express it as energetically as he
could. Pheidias stands on the ground of accomplished art. The mythus
selected for treatment is developed with perfect fidelity, but also
with regard to æsthetical effect. Praxiteles neglects the event, the
substance of the mythus. His interest in that has languished, and has
been supplanted by enthusiasm for mere forms of beauty. He lavishes
a Pheidian wealth of genius on separate figures and situations of no
great import except for their consummate loveliness. In architecture,
the genealogy of the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders points to
the same law. Take another instance from modern painting. Giotto,
Raphael, Correggio, differ less perhaps in actual calibre than in
relative historical position. Giotto, intent upon the fundamental
ideas of Christian mythology, determines to express them forcibly,
faithfully, earnestly, without regarding aught but the best method of
investing them with harmony, lucidity, and dignity. Raphael ascends a
step, and combines the strength and purity of Giotto with elaborate
beauty and classic finish of style. Correggio at his appearance finds
all the great work done. The Christian mythus has been adequately set
forth by his predecessors. He is driven to become the thaumaturgist
of chiaroscuro, the audacious violator of unity in composition,
the supreme painter of erotic paradise. Further development of the
religious idea beyond that achieved by Raphael was impossible. Already
in Raphael's work a compromise between religious austerity and pagan
grace had been observable. The simplicity of Giotto was gone beyond
recapture. Correggio could only be original by carrying onward to its
ultimate perfection the element of beauty for its own sake introduced
by Raphael. Like Euripides, Correggio was condemned to the misfortune
of separating beauty from the idea, the body from the spirit. With
them the forces inherent in the germs of their respective arts were
exhausted. But those who rightly understand them must, we imagine,
be prepared to accept with gratitude the existence of Correggio and
Euripides, both as complementing Giotto and Æschylus, and also as
accounting for the meridian splendor of Sophocles and Raphael. Without
the cadence of Euripides the majestic aria of Sophocles would hardly be
played out. By studying the Correggiosity of Correggio we comprehend
how much of mere æsthetic beauty is held in solution in the work of
Raphael. It is thus, as it were, that, like projectiles, arts describe
their parabolas and end.
To return in detail to the Greek tragedians. Æschylus determines at
all hazards to exhibit the chosen mythus in its entirety, and to give
full prominence to his religious idea. Hence we have to put up with
much that is tedious--a whole _Choëphoroe_, for example. But hence
the unrivalled majesty of the _Agamemnon_. Sophocles manipulates
his subject more artistically, so as to make it harmonious without
losing sight of its internal source of unity. But he already begins to
disintegrate the colossal work of Æschylus--notably in his separation
of the trilogy and in his moralizing of the idea of Nemesis. With
Euripides the disintegration is complete. He neglects the mythus
altogether. The theosophy of Æschylus, always implicit in Sophocles,
survives as a mere conventionality in the work of Euripides. Finally,
like Praxiteles, he carves single statues of eminent beauty; like
Correggio, he conceals his poverty of design beneath a mass of
redundant elegance. What we have really to regret in the art of
Euripides is that he should have endeavored to compete at all with
Æschylus and Sophocles upon the old ground of the tales of Thebes and
Troy. Where he breaks new ground, as in the _Medea_, the _Hippolytus_,
and the _Bacchæ_, he proves himself a consummate master. Here the
novelty of his method shocks no sense of traditional propriety. He
is not driven to flippant paradox or sarcastic scepticism in dealing
with time-honored myths, or to travesties of well-marked characters,
in order to assert his individuality. These plays exhibit a complete
unity of outward form, and a profound internal unity of passion and
character. They are not surpassed in their own kind by anything that
any other poet had produced; and if "the _chef-d'oeuvre_ be adequate
to the _chef-d'oeuvre_," Euripides may here be pronounced the rival of
Sophocles and Shakespeare.
To enter into an elaborate analysis of Euripides as a poet would be
beyond the scope of this essay, which has for its subject the relation
of the third great dramatist to his predecessors and to Greek tragedy
in general. Yet something must be added to justify the opinion just
expressed, that, though Euripides suffered by the constraint under
which he labored in competition with rivals who had nearly exhausted
the resources of the tragic art, yet he displays beauties of his own
of such transcendent merit as to place him in the first rank of the
poets of the world. It would be a delightful task to attempt to do
him justice in the teeth of a malevolent generation of critics, led
by Schlegel and Müller, who do not understand him--to summon from the
shadows of the Attic stage the "magnificent witch" Medea, pure-souled
Polyxena, wifely Alcestis, fiery-hearted Phædra, chaste and cold
Hippolytus, Andromache upon her chariot a royal slave, Orestes in his
agony soothed by a sister's ministrations, the sunny piety of Ion, the
self-devotion of Menoikeus--intermingling perchance these pictured
forms, pure, statuesque and clear as frescos from Pompeii, with choric
odes and exquisite descriptions. The lyrics of Euripides are among the
choicest treasures of Greek poetry: they flow like mountain rivulets
flashing with sunbeams, eddying in cool, shady places, rustling through
leaves of mint, forget-me-not, marsh-marigold, and dock. His landscapes
are most vivid: in ancient poetry there is nothing to compete with the
pictures of Cithæron, where the Bacchantes lie limb-length beneath
the silver-firs, their snakes asleep, and the mountain air ruffling
their loose curls; or with the cave of Polyphemus, where the satyrs
lead their flocks from pasture up the valley between stone-pine and
chestnut-tree to the lawns that overhang dark purple sea-waves. In the
department of the picturesque Euripides is unrivalled. His paintings
have the truth to nature, the delicately modulated outline, and the
facile grace of the most perfect bass-reliefs or frescos.
But to attempt this labor of criticism would be to write a book upon
Euripides. It must be enough in this place to illustrate one quality
which occupies a large space in the dramatic ethics of Euripides,
and forms the motive of the action of his leading characters. The
old religious basis of Nemesis having been virtually abandoned by
him, Euripides fell back upon the morality of passions and emotions.
For his cardinal virtue he chose what the Greeks call #eupsychia#,
stoutheartedness, pluck in the noblest sense of the word--that temper
of the soul which prepared the individual to sacrifice himself for the
State, and to triumph in pain or death or dogged endurance rather than
give way to feebler instincts. That this quality should be prominent in
Euripides is not without significance. Not only did it enable him to
construct most thrilling scenes: it also harmonized with the advancing
tendencies of Greek philosophy, which already held within itself the
germs of Stoicism--or the theory of #karteria#.[7] But in his dramatic
handling of the motive he softened its harder outlines by touches of
exquisite unselfishness, converting adamantine firmness into almost
tremulous devotion. One of the most pathetic exhibitions of this virtue
occurs in the _Phoenissæ_. The Seven Captains are beleaguering Thebes,
and affairs are going ill with the garrison. Teiresias, however,
prophesies that if Creon's son, Menoikeus, will kill himself, Thebes
must triumph. Creon accepts the prophecy, but seeks to save his son;
he sends for Menoikeus and instructs him how he may escape to Dodona.
Menoikeus pretends to agree with what his father counsels, and, after
true Euripidean fashion, sends Creon to get his journey-money. Then
the boy, left alone upon the stage, turns to the Chorus and begins his
speech:
How well have I my father's fears allayed
With fraudulent words to compass my own will!
Lo, he would filch me hence, with shame to me,
Loss to my fatherland. An old man's heart
Deserves some pity.--What pity can I claim
If I betray the land that gave me birth?
Know then that I shall go and save the state,
Giving my life and dying for this land.
For this is shameful; if beneath no ban
Of oracles, bound by no force of fate,
But standing to their shields, men dare to die
Under the ramparts of the town they love;
While I, untrue to brother and to sire,
And to my country, like a felon slink
Far hence in exile! Lo, where'er I roam,
All men would call me coward! By great Zeus,
Who dwells among the stars, by bloody Ares,
Who made the dragon-seed in days of old
Lords of the land, I swear this shall not be!
But I will go, and on the topmost towers
Standing, will dash into the murky den
Where couched the dragon, as the prophet bade.
Thus will I free my country. I have spoken.
See, then, I leave you: it is no mean gift
In death I give the city; but my land
I purge of sickness. If all men were bold
Of their good things to work the public weal,
I ween our towns had less of ills to bear,
And more of blessings for all days to be.
With the _Phoenissæ_ in our hands, one other passage may be translated
which displays the power possessed by Euripides of composing a dramatic
picture, and presenting pathos to the eye. Eteocles and Polyneices have
been wounded to the death. Jocasta, their mother, and Antigone, their
sister, go forth to the battlefield to find them:
Then rushed their wretched mother on the twain;
And seeing them thus wounded unto death,
Wailed: "O my sons! too late, too late I come
To succor you!" Then, clasping them by turns,
She wept and mourned the long toil of her breasts,
Groaning; and by her side their sister groaned:
"O ye who should have been my mother's stay
In age, O, thoughtless of my maiden years
Unwedded, dearest brothers!" From his chest
Heaving a heavy breath, King Eteocles heard
His mother, and stretched forth a cold damp hand
On hers, and nothing said, but with his eyes
Spake to her by his tears, showing kind thoughts
In symbols. Then the other, who still breathed,
Looked at his sister, and the queen, and said,
"We have perished, mother! yea, I pity thee,
And this my sister, and my brother dead;
For dear he was--my foe--and yet was dear.
Bury me, O my mother, and thou, too,
Sweet sister, in my father's land, I pray;
And close my dying eyelids with thy hand,
Mother!"--Upon his eyes he placed her hand--
"And fare you well! Now darkness clips me round."
Then both breathed out their weary life together.
But the queen, when she saw this direful end,
Maddened with anguish drew the dead man's sword,
And wrought things horrible; for through her throat
She thrust the blade; and on her dearest falling
Dies, and lies stretched, clasping both in her arms.
But to return to the virtue of #eupsychia#. The play of _Hecuba_
contains a still more touching picture of heroism in death than that
displayed by Menoikeus. Troy has been taken. Ulysses is sent by the
Greeks to inform Hecuba that her daughter Polyxena must be sacrificed.
Hecuba reminds him how in former days he had come disguised as a spy
to Troy, and how she had recognized him, and, at his strong entreaty,
spared him from discovery. In return for this, let him now spare her
daughter. Frigidly and politely Ulysses replies, "True, lady, a life
for a life. You saved mine, I would do something to save yours; but
your daughter is quite another person. I have not the pleasure of
having received benefits from her. I must trouble her to follow me."
Then Polyxena breaks silence:
I see thee, how beneath thy robe, O king,
Thy hand is hidden, thy face turned from mine,
Lest I should touch thee by the beard and pray.
Fear not: thou hast escaped the god of prayers
For my part. I will rise and follow thee,
Driven by strong need; yea, and not loath to die.
Lo! if I should not seek death, I were found
A cowardly, life-loving, selfish soul!
For why should I live? Was my sire not king
Of all broad Phrygia? Thus my life began;
Then was I nurtured on fair bloom of hope
To be the bride of kings; no small the suit,
I ween, of lovers seeking me: thus I
Was once--ah, woe is me! of Idan dames
Mistress and queen, 'mid maidens like a star
Conspicuous, peer of gods, except for death;
And now I am a slave: this name alone
Makes me in love with death--so strange it is.
Sheer contempt of life, when life has to be accepted on dishonorable
terms, is the virtue of Polyxena. But, so far, though we may admire
her fortitude, we have not been touched by her misfortune. Euripides
reserves the pathos, after his own fashion, for a picture. Talthybius,
the herald, is telling Hecuba how her daughter died:
The whole vast concourse of the Achaian host
Stood round the tomb to see your daughter die.
Achilleus' son taking her by the hand,
Placed her upon the mound, and I stayed near;
And youths, the flower of Greece, a chosen few,
With hands to check thy heifer, should she bound,
Attended. From a cup of carven gold,
Raised full of wine, Achilleus' son poured forth
Libation to his sire, and bade me sound
Silence throughout the whole Achaian host.
I, standing there, cried in the midst these words:
"Silence, Achaians! let the host be still!
Hush hold your voices!" Breathless stayed the crowd;
But he: "O son of Peleus, father mine,
Take these libations pleasant to thy soul,
Draughts that allure the dead: come, drink the black
Pure maiden's blood wherewith the host and I
Sue thee: be kindly to us; loose our prows,
And let our barks go free; give safe return
Homeward from Troy to all, and happy voyage."
Such words he spake, and the crowd prayed assent.
Then from the scabbard, by its golden hilt,
He drew the sword, and to the chosen youths
Signalled that they should bring the maid; but she,
Knowing her hour was come, spake thus, and said:
"O men of Argus who have sacked my town,
Lo, of free will I die! let no man touch
My body: boldly will I stretch my throat.
Nay, but I pray you set me free, then slay;
That free I thus may perish: 'mong the dead,
Being a queen, I blush to be called slave."
The people shouted, and King Agamemnon
Bade the youths loose the maid, and set her free:
She, when she heard the order of the chiefs,
Seizing her mantle, from the shoulder down
To the soft centre of her snowy waist
Tore it, and showed her breasts and bosom fair
As in a statue. Bending then with knee
On earth, she spake a speech most piteous:
"See you this breast, oh! youth, if breast you will,
Strike it; take heart: or if beneath my neck,
Lo! here my throat is ready for your sword!"
He willing not, yet willing, pity-stirred
In sorrow for the maiden, with his blade
Severed the channels of her breath: blood flowed;
And she, though dying, still had thought to fall
In seemly wise hiding what eyes should see not.
But when she breathed her life out from the blow,
Then was the Argive host in divers way
Of service parted; for some bringing leaves,
Strewed them upon the corpse; some piled a pyre,
Dragging pine trunks and boughs; and he who bore none,
Heard from the bearers many a bitter word:
"Standest thou, villain? Hast thou then no robe,
No funeral honors for the maid to bring?
Wilt thou not go and get for her who died
Most nobly, bravest-souled, some gift?" Thus they
Spake of thy child in death: "O thou most blessed
Of women in thy daughter, most undone!"