_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.
In order to comprehend the differences between the ancient and the
modern drama--between the tragedy of Sophocles and the tragedy of
Shakespeare--it is necessary to enter into the details of the history
of the Attic stage. In no other department of art is the character of
the work produced so closely dependent upon the external form which the
artist had to adopt.
Both the tragedy and comedy of the Greeks were intimately connected
with the religious rites of Dionysus. Up to the very last, they formed
a portion of the cultus of the vintage-god, to whom the theatre was
consecrated, and at whose yearly festivals the plays were acted. The
Chorus, which originally formed the chief portion of the dramatic
body, took its station at the altar of Bacchus in the centre of the
theatre. Now the worship of Bacchus in Greece had from the first a
double aspect--joyous and sorrowful. The joyous festivals were held
in celebration of the vigor and the force of nature, in the spring
and summer of the year; the sorrowful commemorated the sadness of the
autumn and the winter. There were, therefore, two distinct branches
of musical and choral art connected with the Dionysiac rites--the one
jovial, the other marked by the enthusiasm of a wild grief. From the
former of these, or the revel-song, sprang Comedy; from the latter, or
the dithyramb, sprang Tragedy. Arion is named as the first great poet
who cultivated the dithyramb and wrote elaborate odes for recitation by
the Chorus in their evolutions round the Bacchic altar. His Chorus were
attired like satyrs in goat-skins, to represent the woodland comrades
of the god; hence came the name of tragedy or goat-song. At first the
dithyrambic odes celebrated only the mystical woes of Dionysus: then
they were extended so as to embrace the mythical incidents connected
with his worship; and at last the god himself was forgotten, and the
tragic sufferings of any hero were chanted by the Chorus. This change
is marked by an old tradition concerning Sicyon, where it is said that
the woes of the hero Adrastus were sung by the Bacchic choir, and that
Cleisthenes, wishing to suppress the national mythology, restored the
antique Dionysiac function. It also may explain the Greek proverb:
"What has this to do with Dionysus?"--a question which might reasonably
have been asked when the sacred representation diverged too widely from
the line of Bacchic legend.
Thus the original element of Greek tragedy was the dithyramb, as
cultivated by Arion; and the first step in the progress of the
dithyrambic Chorus towards the Drama was the introduction of heroic
legends into the odes. The next step was the addition of the actor.
It has been ingeniously conjectured that the actor was borrowed from
the guild of rhapsodes. The iambics of Archilochus and other poets
were recited, as we know, at the feasts of Demeter, whose cult had
points of similarity with that of Bacchus. It is not improbable that
when the heroic element was added to the dithyramb, and the subjects
handled by the professional reciters of the Homeric and cyclic epics
began to form a part of the Dionysiac celebration, a rhapsode was
then introduced to help the Chorus in their office. That he declaimed
iambics and not hexameters may be accounted for by the prevalence of
the iambic in the sister-cult of Demeter. This, then, was the third
step in the development of tragedy. To the dithyrambic chorus of Arion
was added an interlocutor, who not only recited passages of narrative,
but also exchanged speech with the Chorus, and who, in course of time,
came to personate the hero whose history was being celebrated. Thus
far had the art advanced in the age of Thespis. The Chorus stood and
danced round the altar of Bacchus. The rhapsode, whom we now begin to
call the actor, stood on a raised stage (#logeion#) above them. The
whole history of Greek tragedy exhibits a regular expansion of these
simple elements. The function of the Chorus, the peculiar nature of the
masks and dresses, and the very structure of the theatres, can only be
explained by reference to this primitive constitution of the dramatic
art.
To Thespis the Athenian, whose first regular exhibition of the tragic
show preceded the birth of Æschylus by about ten years, belongs the
credit of having brought the various elements of tragedy into harmony,
and of having fixed the outlines of the tragic art. The destruction of
Athens by the Persian army, like the burning of London, which inflicted
so severe an injury upon our early dramatic literature, obliterated
the monuments of the genuine Thespian tragedy. Some of the names of
these dramas--_Pentheus_, _Phorbas_, _the Funeral Games of Pelias_,
_the Priests_--have been preserved; from which we may conjecture
that Thespis composed interludes with regular plots, combining
choric passages and monologues uttered by the actor with elucidatory
dialogues. His Chorus was the traditional band of mummers clad in
goat-skins--the #tragoi# of the ancient Dionysiac festival. The poet
himself was the actor, and his portion of the interlude was written
either in iambic or, as we may gather from a passage in the _Poetics_
of Aristotle, in trochaic metre. The next great name after Thespis is
Phrynichus, who composed a tragic interlude on the taking of Miletus by
the Persians. This fact is important, since it proves that even at this
early period a dramatist felt justified not merely in departing from
the myths of Dionysus, but also in treating the events of contemporary
history in his choric tragedy. The Athenians, however, were indignant
at so abrupt a departure from usage, and at the unæsthetical exhibition
of disasters which had recently befallen their race. They fined the
poet, and confirmed their tragedians in the custom of handling only
ancient and religious legends. It is well known that the single
exception to this custom which has been preserved to us is the splendid
triumph of Æschylus composed upon the ruin of the godless Xerxes.
Phrynichus introduced one important change into the Thespian drama: he
established female characters. After him came Pratinas, who altered the
old form of the Chorus. Hitherto, whatever may have been the subject
of the play, the Bacchic #tragoi# stood in their quaint goat-skins
round the thymelé, or altar of the god. Pratinas contrived that in
future the Chorus should be attired to suit the action of the piece. If
the play were written on the fall of Troy, for instance, they appeared
as ancient Trojans; or if it had reference to the house of Laius, they
came forth as senators of Thebes. At the same time special pieces for
the traditional tragic chorus were retained, and these received the
name of satyric dramas. Henceforth it was customary for a tragic author
to produce at the same time three successive dramas on the subject he
selected, together with a satyric play. The only essential changes
which were afterwards made in Greek tragedy were the introduction of
a second actor by Æschylus and of a third actor by Sophocles, the
abandonment of the stricter rule of the tetralogy, and the gradual
diminution of the importance of the Chorus. The choric element, which
had been everything at the commencement, gave way to the dialogue, as
the art of developing dramatic situations and characters advanced;
until in the days of Euripides the Chorus formed a comparatively
insignificant part of the tragic machinery. This curtailment of the
function of the Chorus was a necessary consequence of progress in the
art of exhibiting an imitation of human action and passion. Yet the
Chorus never lost its place in Greek tragedy. It remained to mark the
origin of the drama, and as a symbol of the essentially religious
purpose of the tragic spectacle.
An event is said to have happened during the age of Pratinas which
greatly influenced the future of the Attic drama. The Thespian
interludes had been acted on a wooden scaffolding. This fell down on
one occasion, and caused so much alarm that the Athenians erected a
permanent stone theatre, which they constructed on the southeast side
of the Acropolis. Whether this old story is a fiction, and whether the
time had not naturally arrived for a more substantial building, may
admit of question. At any rate the new theatre was designed as though
it were destined to exist for all time, as though its architects were
prescient that the Attic drama would become the wonder of the world.
The spectators were seated on semicircular tiers scooped out of the
rock of the Acropolis. Their faces turned towards Hymettus and the sea.
The stage fronted the Acropolis; the actors had in view the cliffs upon
which stood the Parthenon and the gleaming statue of Protective Pallas.
The whole was open to the air. Remembering these facts, we are enabled
to understand the peculiar grandeur and propriety of those addresses
to the powers of the earth and sky, to the temples of the gods, to the
all-seeing sun and glittering ocean-waves, which are so common in Greek
tragedy. The Athenian theatre was brought into close connection with
all that was most brilliant in the architecture and the sculpture of
Athens, with all that is most impressive in the natural environments
of the city, with the very deities of the Hellenic worship in their
visible manifestations to the senses of men. This circumstance alone
determined many peculiarities of the Greek drama, which make it wholly
unlike our own. If the hero of a modern play, for instance, calls the
sun to witness, he must point to a tissue-paper transparency in the
centre of a painted scene; if he apostrophizes ocean, he must turn
towards a heaving mass of agitated canvas. But Ajax or Electra could
raise their hands to the actual sun, gilding the statue of Athene with
living rays; Prometheus, when he described the myriad laughter of the
dimpling waves, knew that the sea was within sight of the audience;
and sun and sea were regarded by the nation at large, not merely as
phenomena of our universe, but as beings capable of sympathizing with
humanity in its distress. For the same reason nearly all the scenes
of the Greek tragedies are laid in daytime and in the open air. The
work of art exhibited in an unparalleled combination of æsthetical
definiteness with the actual facts of nature. The imagination is
scarcely more wrought upon than the senses; whereas the tragedy of
Shakespeare makes a direct appeal to the inner eye and to the highly
stimulated fancy of the audience. It is generally before a temple
or a palace that the action of a Greek play proceeds. Nor was there
anything artificial in this custom; for the Greeks lived in the air
of heaven, nor could events of such magnitude as those which their
tragedy represented have been appropriately enacted beneath the shadow
of a private roof. Far different were the conditions which the modern
dramatist undertook to illustrate. The hesitations of Hamlet, the
spiritual conflict of Faustus, the domestic sufferings of the Duchess
of Malfi, are evolved with peculiar propriety within the narrow walls
of palace-chambers, college-cells, and prisons or madhouses. Scenery,
in our sense of the word, was scarcely required by the Greeks. The name
of a tragedy sufficed to determine what palace-gate was represented
by the stage: the statue of a god was enough to show whose temple
was intended. This simplicity of theatrical arrangement led to a
corresponding simplicity of dramatic construction, to rarity of changes
in the scene, and to the stationary character of Greek tragedy in
general.
Hollowed out of the hillside, the seats of the Athenian spectators
embraced rather more than a full semicircle, and this large arc was
subtended by a long straight line--the #skênê#, or background of the
stage. In front of this wall ran a shallow platform, not coextensive
with the #skênê#, but corresponding to the middle portion of it. This
platform was the stage proper. It was, in fact, a development of the
Thespian #logeion#. The stage was narrow and raised a little above
the ground, to which a flight of steps led from it. On the stage,
very long in proportion to its depth, all the action of the play took
place: the actors entered it through three openings in the #skênê#,
of which the central was larger and the two side ones smaller. When
they stood upon the stage, they had not much room for grouping or
for complicated action: they moved and stood like the figures in a
bass-relief, turning their profiles to the audience, and so arranging
their gestures that a continually harmonious series of figures was
relieved upon the background of the #skênê#. The central opening had
doors capable of being thrown back and exhibiting a chamber, in which,
at critical moments of the action, such spectacles as the murdered
body of Agamemnon, or the suicide of Jocasta, were revealed to the
spectators. The Chorus had their own allotted station in the centre of
the whole theatre--the semicircular pit left between the lowest tier
of spectators and the staircase leading to the stage. In the middle
of this pit or orchestra was placed the thymelé, or altar of Bacchus,
round which the Chorus moved on its first entrance, and where it stood
while witnessing the action on the stage. The Chorus entered by side
passages leading from the back of the #skênê#, on a lower level than
that of the stage; nor did they ever leave their orchestra to mount
the stage and mingle with the actors. The dressing-rooms and offices
of the theatre were concealed behind the #skênê#. Above the stage was
suspended an aerial platform for the gods, while subterranean stairs
were constructed for the appearance of ghosts ascending from the nether
regions.
These details about the vast size of the theatre, its system of
construction, and its exposure to the air, make it clear that no
acting similar to that of the modern drama could have been possible
on the Attic stage. Any one who has visited the Roman theatre of
Orange, where the #skênê# is still in tolerable preservation, must
have felt that a classical audience could not have enjoyed the subtle
intonations of the voice and the delicate changes in the features,
expressive of varying passions, which constitute the charm of modern
acting. Our intricate and minute effects were out of the question.
Everything in the Greek theatre had to be colossal, statuesque, almost
stationary. The Greeks had so delicate a sense of proportion and of
fitness that they adjusted their art to these necessities. The actors
were raised on thick-soled and high-heeled boots: they wore masks, and
used peculiar mouth-pieces, by means of which their voices were made
more resonant. The dresses which they swept along the stage were the
traditional costumes of the Bacchic festivals--brilliant and trailing
mantles, which added volume to their persons. All their movements
partook of the dignity befitting demigods and heroes. To suppose that
these pompous figures were of necessity ridiculous would be a great
mistake. Everything we know about Greek art makes it certain that in
the theatre, no less than in sculpture and architecture, this nation
of artists achieved a perfectly harmonious effect. How dignified, for
example, were their masks, may be imagined from the sculptured heads of
Tragedy and Comedy preserved in the Vatican--marble faces of sublime
serenity, surmounted by the huge mass of curling hair, which was built
up above the mask to add height to the figure. But in order to maintain
the grandeur of these personages on the stage, it was necessary that
they should never move abruptly or struggle violently. This is perhaps
the chief reason why Greek tragedy was so calm and so processional
in character, why all its vehement action took place off the stage,
why some of its most impassioned expressions of emotion were cadenced
in elaborate lyrics with a musical accompaniment. An actor, mounted
on his buskins, and carrying the weight of the tragic mask, could
never have encountered a similar gigantic being in personal combat
without betraying some awkwardness of movement or exhibiting some
unseemly gesture. It was, therefore, necessary to create the part of
the Messenger as an artistic correlative to the peculiarly artificial
conditions of the stage. We find in the same circumstance a reason why
the tragic situation was sustained with such intensity, why the action
was limited to a short space of time and to a single locality, and why
few changes were permitted in the characters during the conduct of
the same piece. For the mask depicted one fixed cast of features; and
though, as in the case of Oedipus, who tears out his eyes in a play of
Sophocles, the actor might appear twice upon the stage with different
masks, yet he could not be constantly changing them. Therefore the
strong point of the Greek dramatist lay in the construction of such
plots and characters as admitted of sustained and steady passion,
whereas a modern playwright aims at providing parts which shall enable
a great actor to exhibit lights and shades of varying expression. It
still remains a problem how such parts as the Cassandra of Æschylus
and the Orestes of Euripides could have been adequately acted with a
mask to hide the features; but such effects as those for which Garrick,
Rachel, and Talma were celebrated would have been utterly impossible at
Athens.
In attempting to form any conception of a Greek drama, we must imbue
our minds with the spirit of Greek sculpture, and animate some
frieze or bass-relief, supplying the accompaniment of simple and
magnificent music, like that of Gluck, or like the recitatives of
Porpora. Flaxman's designs for Æschylus are probably the best possible
reconstruction of the scenes of a Greek tragedy, as they appeared
to the eyes of the spectators, relieved upon the background of the
#skênê#. Schlegel is justly indignant with those critics who affirm
that the modern opera affords an exact parallel to the Greek drama. Yet
the combination of music, acting, scenery, and dancing in such an opera
as Gluck's _Orfeo_ or Cherubini's _Medea_ may come nearer than anything
else towards giving us a notion of one of the tragedies of Euripides.
This remark must be qualified by the acknowledgment of a radical
and fundamental difference between the two species of dramatic art.
Music, dancing, acting, and scenery, with the Greeks, were sculptural,
studied, stately; with the moderns they are picturesque, passionate,
mobile. If the opera at all resembles the Greek drama, it is because
of the highly artificial development of the histrionic art which it
exhibits. The expression of passion in a stationary and prolonged aria,
with which we are familiar in the opera, and which is far removed from
nature, was of common occurrence in Greek tragedy.[106]
So far we have been occupied with those characteristics of the ancient
drama which were immediately determined by the external circumstances
of the Attic stage. I have tried to show that some of the most marked
qualities of the work of art were necessitated by the conditions of its
form. But other and not less important points of difference between
the ancient and the modern drama were due to the subject-matter of the
former. The Greek playwrights confined themselves to a comparatively
narrow circle of mythical stories;[107] each in succession had recourse
to Homer and to the poets of the epic cycle. Æschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides, not to mention their numerous forgotten rivals, handled
and rehandled the same themes. We have, for example, extant three
tragedies, the _Choëphoroe_ of Æschylus, the _Electra_ of Sophocles,
and the _Electra_ of Euripides, composed upon precisely the same
incident in the tale of Agamemnon's children. Modern dramatists, on
the contrary, start with the whole stuff of human history; they seek
out their subjects where they choose, or invent motives with a view to
the exhibition of varied character, force of passion, tragic effect;
nor have they any fixed basis of solid thought like the doctrine
of Nemesis[108] whereon to rear their tragic superstructure. In
this respect the mystery-plays of the Catholic Church offer a close
parallel to the Greek drama. In these dramatic shows the whole body
of Christian tradition--the Bible, the acts of the saints, and the
doctrines of the Church about the Judgment and the final state of the
soul--was used as the material from which to fashion sacred plays.
But between the mysteries and the early Attic tragedies there was one
great point of difference. The sanctity of the Christian tradition,
by giving an immovable form to the legends, precluded all freedom of
the fancy. There could be no inventive action of the poet's mind when
he was engaged in setting forth the mysteries of the Incarnation,
the Atonement, or the final Judgment. His object was to instruct the
people in certain doctrines, and all he could do was to repeat over and
over again the same series of events in which God had dealt with man.
Therefore, when the true dramatic instinct awoke in modern Europe, the
playwrights had to quit this narrow sphere of consecrated thoughts.
Miracle-plays were succeeded by moralities, by histories, and by those
unfettered creations of which Marlowe in England offered the first
illustrious examples. Had the Thespian interludes been as purely
didactic in their object as the early mystery-plays of the Church,
we should either have possessed no Attic drama at all or else have
received from the Greek poets a very different type of tragedy. As it
was, the very essence of Greek religion reached its culminating point
in art. Epical mythology attained to final development in the free
artistic creations of Sophocles. Meanwhile the dramatists were hampered
in their choice of subjects by the artificial restraints imposed upon
them. They were never at liberty to invent. They were always bound
to keep in view the traditional interpretation of legends to which a
semi-religious importance attached.
Many distinctions between the ancient and the modern drama may
be deduced from this original difference in the sources of their
materials. The conception of retributive justice pervades the whole
tragedy of the Greeks; and the maintenance of this one animating idea
is due no doubt in a great measure to the continued treatment of a
class of subjects which not only remarkably exhibited its working, but
which also were traditionally interpreted in its light. The modern
drama has no such central idea. Our tragedy imports no dominant
religious or moral conception into the sphere of art. Even Shakespeare
and Goethe, the most highly moralized of modern dramatists, have been
contented with bringing close before our eyes the manifold spectacle
of human existence, wonderful and brilliant, from which we draw such
lessons only as can be learned from life itself. They do not undertake,
like the Greek tragedians, to supply the solution as well as the
problem. It is enough for them to exhibit humanity in conflict, to
enlist our sympathies on the side of what is noble, or to arouse our
pity by the sight of innocence in misery. The struggle of Lear with
his unnatural daughters, the death of Cordelia when the very doors of
hope have just been opened; Desdemona dying by her husband's hand,
without one opportunity of explanation; Imogen flouted as a faithless
wife; Hamlet wrestling with Laertes in the grave of Ophelia; Juliet
and Romeo brought by a mistake to death in the May-time of their love;
Faust inflicting by his bitter gift of selfish passion woe after woe
on Margaret and her family--these are the subjects of our tragedy. We
have to content ourselves as we can with this "mask and antimask of
impassioned life, breathing, moving, acting, suffering, laughing," and
to moralize it as we may. The case is different with Greek tragedy.
There we always learn one lesson--#tôi drasanti pathein#, the guilty
must suffer. It is only in a few such characters as Antigone or
Polyxena that pure pathos seems to weigh down the balance of the law.
A minor consequence of the fixed nature of Attic tragedy was that the
dramatists calculated on no surprise in order to enlist the interest of
their audience. The name, Oedipus or Agamemnon, informed the spectators
what course the action of the play would take. The art of the poet,
therefore, consisted in so displaying his characters, so preparing
his incidents, and so developing the tragic import of the tale, as to
excite attention. From this arose a peculiar style of treatment, and
in particular that irony of which so much is spoken. The point, for
example, about the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ was that the spectators knew
his horrible story, but that he did not. Therefore, every word he
uttered in his pride of prosperity was charged with sinister irony,
was pregnant with doom. Every minute incident brought him nearer to
the final crash, which all the while was ready waiting for him. In
reading this tragedy of Sophocles we seem to be watching a boatful
of careless persons gliding down a river, and gradually approaching
its fall over a vast cliff. If we take interest in them, how terrible
is our anxiety when they come within the irresistible current of the
sliding water, how frightful is their cry of anguish when at last they
see the precipice ahead, how horror-stricken is the silence with which
they shoot the fall, and are submerged! Of this nature is the interest
of a good Greek tragedy. But in the case of the modern drama all is
different. When our Elizabethan ancestors went to the theatre to hear
_Othello_ for the first time, very few of them knew the story: as the
play proceeded, they could not be sure whether Iago would finally
prevail. At every moment the outcome was doubtful. Tragic irony is,
therefore, not a common element in the modern drama. The forcible
exhibition of a new and striking subject, the gradual development of
passions in fierce conflict, the utmost amount of pathos accumulated
round the victims of malice or ill-luck, exhaust the resources of the
tragedian. The ancient dramatist plays with his cards upon the table:
the modern dramatist conceals his hand. Euripides prefixed a prologue
descriptive of the action to his pieces. Our tragedies open only with
such scenes as render the immediate conduct of the play intelligible.
Aristotle's definition of tragedy, founded upon a vast experience,
we need not doubt, of the best Greek dramas, offers another point
of contrast between the ancient and the modern art. "Tragedy," he
says, "is an imitation of an action that is weighty, complete, and of
a proper magnitude; it proceeds by action and not by narration; and
it effects through pity and terror a purgation of the like passions
in the minds of the spectators." This definition, which has caused
great difficulty for commentators, turns upon the meaning of the
#katharsis#,[109] or purgation, which tragedy is supposed to effect.
It is quite clear that _all_ poetry which stirs the feelings of pity
and terror need not at the same time purge them in or from the souls
of the listeners, except only in so far as true art is elevating and
purifying. Therefore Aristotle must have had some special quality of
the tragic art to which he was accustomed in his mind. His words seem
to express that it is the function of the tragic drama to appeal to our
deepest sympathies and strongest passions, to arouse them, but at the
same time to pacify them, and, as it were, to draw off the dangerous
stuff that lies upon our soul--to resolve the perturbation of the mind
in some transcendental contemplation.[110] This is what the greatest
Greek tragedies achieve. They are almost invariably closed by some
sentence of the Chorus in which the unsearchableness of God's dealings
is set forth, and by which we are made to feel that, after the fitful
strife and fever of human wills, the eternal counsels of Zeus remain
unchanged, while the moral order of the world, shaken and distorted
by the passions of heroic sufferers, abides in the serenity of the
ideal. Furthermore, there is in the very substance of almost all Greek
tragedies a more obvious healing of wounds and restoration of harmony
than this. The trilogy of Prometheus was concluded by the absorption
of the Titan's vehement will in that of Zeus. The trilogy of Orestes
ends with the benediction of Pallas and Phoebus upon the righteous
man who had redeemed the errors of his house. Sophocles allows us a
glimpse of Antigone bringing peace and joy to her father and brothers
in Hades. The old Oedipus, after his life-wanderings and crimes
and woes, is made a blessed dæmon through the mercy of propitiated
deities. Hippolytus is reconciled to his father, and is cheered and
cooled in his death-fever by the presence of the maiden Artemis. Thus
the terror and pity which have been roused in each of these cases are
allayed by the actual climax of the plot which has excited them: grief
itself becomes a chariot for surmounting the sources of grief. But the
modern drama does not offer this #katharsis#: its passions too often
remain unreconciled in their original antagonism: the note on which
the symphony terminates is not unfrequently discordant or exciting.
Where is the #katharsis# in _King Lear_? Are our passions purged in any
definite sense by the close of the first part of _Faust_? We are rather
left with the sense of inexpiable guilt and unalleviated suffering,
with yearnings excited which shall never be quelled. The greatest works
of modern fiction--the novels of Balzac, with their philosophy of
wickedness triumphant; the novels of George Eliot, with their dismal
lesson of the feebleness of human effort; the tragedies of Shakespeare,
with the silence of the grave for their conclusion--intensify and
embitter that "struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we
cannot" which Hazlitt gives as an equivalent for life.[111] The
greatest creative poet of this generation writes #anankê# upon his
title-page. The chief poet of the century makes his hero exclaim:
Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren.
Such purification of the passions as modern art achieves is to be
found most eminently in the choric movements of Handel, in the
symphonies of Beethoven, in all the great achievements of music.
Ancient art aimed at the perfect within definite limits, because human
life in the ancient world was circumscribed by mundane limitations,
and its conditions were unhesitatingly accepted. Our art aims at the
infinite, because we are forever striving after a completion which
cannot be attained. It was not for nothing that Christianity, with its
widening of spiritual horizons, closed the ancient and inaugurated the
modern age:
Une immense espérance a traversé la terre;
Malgré nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux.
In that fixed mood of restless expectation, in that persistent attitude
of the soul upraised to sweep the heavens, there lies the secret of
modern art. Life to the Greek belonged to the category of #to peras#,
or the definite: it was like a crystal in its well-defined consistency.
Our life, whether we regard it from the point of view of science or of
religion, belongs to the #apeiron#, or the undetermined: it is only one
term of an infinite series, the significance whereof is relative to
the unknown quantities beyond it. Consequently modern art is nowhere
satisfied with merely æsthetic forms. The soul with its maladies
imperiously demands expression. Michael Angelo was not contented, like
Pheidias or Praxiteles, with carving the serenity of godlike men and
women. In the figures upon the tombs of the Medici he fashioned four
moods of the tortured, aching, anguished soul, to whom the burden of
this life is all but intolerable. His frescos in the Sistine Chapel are
subordinated to the expression of one thought--the doom of God which
will descend upon the soul of man. Christianity destroyed beyond all
possibility of reconstruction the free, frank sensuality of paganism.
It convicted humanity of sin, and taught men to occupy themselves with
the internal warfare of their flesh and spirit as that which is alone
eternally important. Life itself, according to the modern formula,
is a conflict which will be concluded one way or the other beyond
the grave. Meanwhile upon this earth the conflict is undetermined.
Therefore art, which reflects life, represents the battle, and dares
not to anticipate its outcome. In this relation the very pathology
of the soul becomes poetic. #Eran adynatôn#, said the Greek proverb,
#nosos tês psychês#--to desire impossible things is a disease of the
soul. But _l'amour de l'impossible_--the straining of the soul after
the infinite, the desire to approximate in this world to a dream of
the ecstatic fancy--all the rapture of saints, the self-denial of
solitaries, the death in life of penitents--is not defined by us as a
disease. On the contrary, this passion for the impossible has been held
through many centuries of modern history to be the truest sign of the
soul's health; and even where such superstition has not penetrated,
poets like Byron have prided themselves upon the same temper displayed
in their extravagant yearnings. Don Juan, enormous in his appetite for
pleasure, and rebellious on the grave's brink beneath the hand of God;
Faust, insatiable of curiosity, and careless of eternity in his lust
for power; Tannhäuser, pursuing to the end his double life of love too
sweet to be abandoned and of conscience too acutely sensitive to be
stilled; these are our modern legends. These, with so little of mere
action in them, so much of inner meaning and mental experience, yield
the truest materials to our artists. Over and over again have Faust,
Tannhäuser, and Don Juan supplied the poet with subjects wherein no
merely local or temporary tragedy is set forth, but the destiny of
the modern man is shown as in a magic mirror. Nor has the advent of
science as yet restored our mind to that "passionless bride, divine
tranquillity," which the Greeks enjoyed, and which alone could be the
mother of such art as the antique. Although the sublime cheerfulness
of Goethe shows by way of forecast how the scientific mood may lead
to this result hereafter, for the present science has deepened and
complicated our most distressing problems, has rendered the anxiety
of man about his destiny still more cruel, has made him still more
helpless in the effort to comprehend his relations to the universe, by
seeming to prove that his most cherished hypotheses are mere illusions.
Like a spoiled child, who has been taught to expect too much, to think
about himself too much, and to rely too much on flattery, humanity,
shrinking from the cold, calm atmosphere of science, still cries in
feverish accents with St. Paul: "If Christ be not risen, then are we
of men most wretched!" How strange would that sentence have sounded
to Sophocles! How well it suits the tragedy of Shakespeare, which has
for its ultimate Versöhnung the hope, felt, though unexpressed, of St.
Paul's exclamation!
As a corollary to what has hitherto been said about the differences
between the drama of Sophocles and that of Shakespeare, it follows
that the former aims at depicting the destinies, and the latter the
characters of men.[112] Shakespeare exhibits individual wills and
passions clashing together and producing varied patterns in the web
of life. Sophocles unfolds schemes and sequences of doomed events,
where individual wills and passions play indeed their part, but where
they are subordinated to the idea which the tragedian undertakes to
illustrate. A play of Æschylus or Sophocles strikes us by the grandeur
of the whole: a play of Shakespeare or Goethe overwhelms us by the
force and frequence of combined and interacting motives. No analysis
can be too searching or acute for the profound conception which
pervades the _Oresteia_ of Æschylus; but there is no single character
in Æschylus or in Sophocles so worthy of minute investigation as that
of Hamlet or of Faust. If a critic looks to the general effect of a
tragedy, to the power of imagination displayed in its conception as a
single work of art, he will prefer the _Agamemnon_ to _Macbeth_; but
if he seek for the creation of a complete and subtle human soul, he
will abandon Clytemnestra for the Thane of Cawdor's wife. The antique
drama aims at the presentation of tragic situations, determined and
controlled by some mysterious force superior to the agents. The modern
aims at the presentation of tragic situations, immediately produced and
brought about by the free action of the _dramatis personæ_.
One advantage which the modern dramatist has over the ancient is that
he may introduce very numerous persons in concerted action without
the danger of confusion, and that of these many may be female. It
has been ably argued by De Quincey that the Attic tragedians had
small opportunity of studying the female character, and that it would
have been indecorous for them to have painted women with the perfect
freedom of a Cleopatra or a Vittoria Corombona.[113] Consequently their
women are either superficially and slightly sketched like Ismene and
Chrysothemis; or else they are marked by something masculine, as in
the case of Clytemnestra and Medea; or again they move our sympathy
not by the perfection of their womanliness but by the exhibition
of some simple and sublime self-sacrifice--notable examples being
the filial devotion of Antigone, the sisterly affection of Electra,
the uncomplaining submission of Iphigeneia and Polyxena, the wifely
self-abandonment of Alcestis, the almost frigid acquiescence in
death of Makaria. The later Greek drama, and especially the drama of
Euripides, abounded in these characters. They are incarnations of
certain moral qualities. Like the masks which concealed the actor's
face, they show one fixed and sustained mood of emotion: we find in
them no hesitancy and difficult resolve, no ebb and flow of wavering
inclination, but one immutable, magnificent, heroic fixity of purpose.
In a word, they are conformed to the sculptural type of the Greek
tragic art.
Owing to the very structure of the Attic stage, Greek tragedy could
never have recourse to those formless, vague, and unsubstantial sources
of terror and of charm which the modern dramatist has at his command.
How could such airy nothings as the elves of the _Tempest_, the fairies
of _A Midsummer Nights-Dream_, or the witches of _Macbeth_ have been
brought upon that colossal theatre in the full blaze of an Athenian
noon? Figures of Thanatos and of Lyssa did indeed appear: the ghost
of Clytemnestra roused the sleeping Furies in the courts of Delphi:
the phantom of Darius hovered over his grave. But these spectres were
sculpturesque--such as Pheidias might have carved in marble, and
such as we see painted on so-called Etruscan vases. They were not
Banquo-apparitions gliding into visible substance from the vacant gloom
and retiring thitherward again. When such creatures of the diseased
imagination had to be suggested, the seer, like Cassandra, before whose
eyes the phantoms of the children of Thyestes passed, or Orestes, who
drew his arrows upon an unseen cohort of threatening fiends, stared on
vacancy. Shakespeare dares at times to realize such incorporeal beings,
to give to them a voice and a visible form. Yet it may be doubted
whether even in his tremendous supernatural apparatus the voice which
shrieked to Macbeth "Sleep no more!" the mutterings of Lady Macbeth
in her somnambulism, the spectre which Hamlet saw and his mother could
not see, the dream of Clarence with its cry of injured ghosts, are not
really the most appalling.
The Greek drama owed its power to the qualities of regularity
and simplicity: the strength of the modern lies in subtlety and
multiplicity. The external conditions of the Attic theatre, no less
than the prevailing spirit of Greek tragic art, forced this simplicity
and regularity upon the ancient dramatists. These conditions do not
occur in the modern world. We have our little theatres, our limited
audience, our unmasked actors, our scenical illusions, our freedom in
the choice of subjects. Therefore to push the subtlety and multiplicity
of tragic composition to the utmost--to arrange for the most swift
and sudden changes of expression in the actor, for the most delicate
development of a many-sided character, for the most complicated
grouping of contrasted forms, and for the utmost realization of
imaginative incidents--is the glory of a Shakespeare or a Goethe. The
French dramatists made the mistake of clinging to the beggarly elements
of the Attic stage, when they had no means of restoring its colossal
grandeur. When it was open to them to rival the work of the ancients in
a new and truly modern style, they hampered their genius by arbitrary
rules, and thought that they were following the principles of the
highest art, while they submitted to the mere necessities of a bygone
form of presentation. If Racine had believed in Nemesis, if Versailles
had afforded him a theatre and an audience like that of Athens, if his
actors had worn masks, if sculpture had been the dominant art of modern
Europe, he would have been following the right track. As it was, he
became needlessly formal. The same blind enthusiasm for antiquity led
to the doctrine of the unities, to the abstinence from bloodshed on
the stage, and to the restriction of a play to five acts. Horace had
advised a dramatist not to extend his tragedy beyond the fifth act, nor
to allow Medea to murder her children within sight of the audience. All
modern playwrights observe the rule of five acts: nor is there much
to be said against it, except that the third act is apt to be languid
for want of matter. But the Greeks disregarded this division: judging
by the choric songs, we find that some of their tragedies have as many
as seven, and some as few as two acts. Again, as to bloodshed on the
stage, it is probable that if the Greek actors had not been so clumsily
arrayed, we should have had many instances of their violation of this
rule. Æschylus discloses the shambles where Agamemnon and Cassandra
lie weltering in their blood, and hammers a stake through the body of
Prometheus. Sophocles exhibits Oedipus with eyes torn out and bleeding
on his cheeks. Euripides allows the mangled corpse of Astyanax to be
brought upon the stage on his father's shield. There is nothing more
ghastly in an actual murder than in these spectacles of slaughter and
mutilation. With reference to the unities, the French critics demand
that a drama shall proceed in the same place, and the playwrights
are at infinite pains to manage that no change of scene shall occur.
But Aristotle, whose authority they claim, is silent on the point;
while the usage of the Greek drama shows more than one change of
place--especially in the _Ajax_ of Sophocles and in the _Eumenides_ of
Æschylus, where the scene is shifted from the temple of Phoebus at
Delphi to the Areopagus at Athens. Still the exigencies of the Greek
theatre made it advisable to alter the centre of action as little as
possible; and as a matter of convenience this requirement was complied
with. The circumstances of our own stage have removed this difficulty,
and it is only on the childish principle of maintaining an impossible
illusion that the unity of place can be observed with any propriety.
The unity of time has more to say for itself. Aristotle remarks that
it is better to have a drama completed within the space of a day: this
rule flows from his just sense of the proportion of parts; a work
of art ought to be such that the mind can easily comprehend it at a
glance. Yet many Greek plays, such as the _Agamemnon_ of Æschylus,
where Agamemnon has time to return from Troy, or the _Eumenides_, where
Orestes performs the journey from Delphi to Athens, disregard this rule
in cases where it required no strain of the mind to bridge over the
space of a few unimportant days or hours. When in the modern drama we
are introduced to the hero of a play first as a child and then as a
full-grown man, and are forced meanwhile to keep our attention on his
acts in the interval as important to the dramatic evolution, there is
a gross violation of æsthetical unity. About the unity of action all
critics are agreed. It is the same as unity of interest, or unity of
subject, the interest and the subject of a play being its action. A
good tragedy must have but one action, just as a good epic or a good
poem of any sort must have but one subject; for the simple reason
that, as the eye cannot look at two things at once, so the mind cannot
attend to two things at once. Modern poets have been apt to disregard
this canon of common-sense: the underplots of many plays and the
episodes of such epics as the _Orlando_ of Ariosto are not sufficiently
subordinated to the main design or interwoven with it. Aristotle is
also right in saying that the unity of the hero is not the same as the
unity of action: a play, for example, on the labors of Hercules could
only be made a good drama if each labor were shown to be one step in
the fulfilment of one divinely appointed task. Shakespeare has complied
with the canon of the unity of action in all his tragedies. Whether
Goethe has done so in _Faust_ may admit of doubt. The identity of his
hero seems to him sufficient for the tragic unity of his piece; yet
he has given us another centre of interest in Margaret, whose story
is but a mere episode in the experience of Faust. Unity of action in
a tragedy, the very soul of which is action, is the same as organic
coherence in a body; and therefore, as every work of art ought,
according to the energetic metaphor of Plato, to be a living creature,
with head, trunk, and limbs all vitalized by one thought, this unity is
essential. Admitting this point, we may fairly say that the other rules
of French dramatic criticism are not only arbitrary, but also founded
on a mistake with regard to the Greek theatre and a misapprehension
of the proper functions of the modern stage. Composing in obedience
to them is like walking upon stilts in a country where there are no
marshes to make the inconvenience necessary.
In this review of the differences between our own tragedy and that
of the Greeks I have scarcely touched upon those primary qualities
which differentiate all modern from ancient art. The "sentiment of the
infinite," which Renan regards as the chief legacy of mediævalism to
modern civilization, and the preoccupation with the internal spirit
rather than the external form which makes music the essentially modern,
as sculpture was the essentially ancient art, are causes of innumerable
peculiarities in our conception of tragedy. I have hardly alluded to
these, but have endeavored to show that the immersion of Greek tragedy
in religious ideas, the fixed body of mythical matter handled by the
Greek dramatists in succession, and the actual conditions of the Attic
theatre, will account for the greater number of those characteristics
which distinguish Sophocles from Shakespeare, the prince of Greek from
the prince of modern tragic poets.
FOOTNOTES:
[106] The scene in which Antigone takes leave of the Chorus within
sight of her tomb is a good instance of this artificial treatment of
passionate situations in the Attic drama. It has been censured by some
critics as being unreasonably protracted. In reality it is in perfect
accordance with the whole spirit of Greek tragedy. The emotions are
brought into artistic relief: the figures are grouped like mourners
on a sculptured monument: the antiphonal dirges of the princess and
her attendants set the pulses of our sympathy in rhythmic movement,
so that grief itself becomes idealized and glorified. The depth of
feeling expressed, and the highly wrought form of its expression,
together tend to rouse and chasten all that is profound and dignified
in our emotions. Strophe after strophe, heart-beat by heart-beat, this
wonderfully cadenced funeral song of her who is the bride of Acheron
proceeds until the marble gates are shut upon Antigone.
[107] See vol. i. p. 34; vol. ii. p. 23.
[108] See vol. ii. p. 15-24.
[109] The word #katharsis# may possibly have been borrowed from
medicine by Aristotle, and his meaning may, therefore, be that the
surplus of the passions of which he speaks is literally purged out
of the mental system by the action of tragedy. This suggestion was, I
think, made by Bernays. It has been pointed out to me by my friend, Mr.
E. Abbot, of Balliol College, that Aristotle, in another passage of the
_Poetics_ (xvii. 8), uses the word in a lustral meaning. The reference
to it in a weighty passage of the _Politics_ (viii. 7, 4) seems to
prove that the purification was for the individual, not, as Goethe
thought, for the passions as exhibited in the work of art itself.
[110] Milton's description of the poet's function in the _Reason of
Church Government urged against Prelacy_ contains a fine expansion
of the phrase #katharsis# in these words: "To allay the perturbation
of the mind and set the affections in right tune." Milton in his own
_Samson Agonistes_ followed the Greek usage closely, and concluded the
whole drama with a choric reflection upon the wisdom of God's dealings
with the race of men. There, again, he expresses in the very last words
of his play the same doctrine of #katharsis#:
His servants He, with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event,
With peace and consolation hath dismissed,
And calm of mind, all passion spent.
Hegel, in his doctrine of the Versöhnung, or reconciliation of opposite
passions in a contemplation which is above them and includes them,
seems to have aimed at the same law as Aristotle.
[111] In the Greek drama the notion of fate was primarily theological:
the hero was conducted to his end by gods. In Shakespeare Fate is
psychological; Hamlet's own character is his destiny. In Goethe,
Victor Hugo, and George Eliot the conception of Fate has passed
into the region of positivism: the laws of blood, society, and race
rule individuals in the _Elective Affinities_, _Les Misérables_, the
_Spanish Gypsy_. The modern analogue for Greek hereditary destiny,
traceable to some original transgression and tainting all the action
of a doomed family, is to be found in madness, which has as yet been
tragically treated by no dramatist of the first rank.
[112] Character in a Greek play is never so minutely anatomized as in
a modern work of fiction. We do not actually see the secret workings
of the mainsprings of personality. We judge a hero of Sophocles by his
actions and by his relations to other men and women more than by his
soliloquies or by scenes specially constructed to expose his qualities.
In this respect Greek tragedy again resembles Greek sculpture. As in
their sculpture the Greek artists felt the muscular structure of the
human frame with exquisite sensibility, while they did not obtrude it
upon the spectator, so in their tragedy the poets preferred to exhibit
the results rather than to lay bare the process of mental and emotional
activity. The modern tragedian shifts his ground somewhat, but he
chooses an equally legitimate province of poetry when he discloses the
inmost labyrinths in the character of a Hamlet or a Faust.
[113] This seems to have been the gist of one of the grudges of
Aristophanes against Euripides, as I have indicated above, p. 47,
_note_. He made the love of Sthenoboea, the vengeance of Medea, too
interesting.