Greece holds such an eminence in history because the Crest-Wave
rolled in there when it did. She was tenant of an epochal time;
whoever was great then, was to be remembered forever. But the
truth is, Greece served the future badly enough.
The sixth and fifth centuries B. C. were an age of transition, in
which the world took a definite step downward. There had been
present among men a great force to keep the life of the nations
sweet: that which we call the Mysteries of Antiquity. Whether
they had been active continuously since this Fifth Root Race
began, who can say? Very possibly not; for in a million years
cycles would repeat themselves, and I dare say conditions
as desolate as our own have obtained. There may have been
withdrawals, and again expansions outward. But certainly they
were there at the dawn of history, and for a long time before.
What their full effect may have been, we can only guess; for when
the history that we know begins, they were already declining:--we
get no definite news, except of the Iron Age. The Mysteries were
not closed at Eleusis until late in the days of the Roman Empire;
and we know that such a great man as Julian did not disdain to be
initiated. But they were only a remnant then, an ever-indrawing
source of inspiration; already a good century before Pericles
they must have ceased to rule life. Pythagoras--born, probably,
in the five-eighties--had found it necessary, to obtain that with
which spirituality might be reawakened, to travel and learn what
he could in India, Egypt, Chaldaea, and, according to Porphyry
and tradition, among the Druids in Gaul--and very likely Britain,
their acredited headquarters. From these countries he brought
home Theosophy to Greek Italy; and all this suggests that he--and
the race--needed something that Eleusis could no longer give.
About the same time Buddha and the founder of Jainism in India,
Laotse and Confucius in China, and as we have seen, probably also
Zoroaster in Persia, all broke away from the Official Mysteries,
more or less, to found Theosophical Movements of their own;
--which would indicate that, at least from the Tyrrhenian to the
Yellow Sea, the Mysteries had, in that sixth century, ceased to
be the efficient instrument of the White Lodge. The substance of
the Ancient Wisdom might remain in them; the energy was largely
gone.
Pisistratus did marvels for Athens; lifting her out of obscurity
to a position which should invite great souls to seek birth in
her. He died in 527; two years later a son was born to the
Eupatrid Euphorion at Eleusis; and I have no doubt there was some
such stir over the event, on Olympus or on Parnassus, as happened
over a birth at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, and one in Florence
in the May of 1265. In 510, Hippias, grown cruel since the
assassination of his brother, was driven out from an Athens
already fomenting with the yeast of new things. About that time
this young Eleusinian Eupatrid was set to watch grapes ripening
for the vintage, and fell asleep. In his dream Dionysos, God of
the Mysteries, appeared to him and bade him write tragedies for
the Dionysian Festival. On waking, he found himself endowed with
genius: beset inwardly with tremendous thoughts, and words to
clothe them in; so that the work became as easy to him as if he
had been trained to it for years.
He competed first in 499--against Choerilos and Pratinas, older
poets--and was defeated; and soon afterwards sailed for Sicily,
where he remained for seven years. The dates of Pythagoras are
surmised, not known; Plumptre, with a query, gives 497 for his
death. I wonder whether, in the last years of his life, that
great Teacher met this young Aeschylus from Athens; whether the
years the latter spent in Sicily on this his first visit there,
were the due seven years of his Pythagorean probation and
initiation? "Veniat Aeschylus," says Cicero, "non poeta solum,
sed etiam Pythagoreus: sic enim accepimus ";--and we may accept
it too; for that was the Theosophical Movement of the age;
and he above all others, Pythagoras having died, was the great
Theosophist. They had the Eleusinian Mysteries at Athens, and
Most of the prominent Athenians must have been initiated
into them--since that was the State Religion; but Aeschylus
alone in Athens went through life clothed in the living power
of Theosophy.
Go to the life of such a man, if you want big clues as to the
inner history of his age;--the life of Aeschylus, I think, can
interpret for us that of Athens. There are times when the
movement of the cycles is accelerated, and you can see the
great wheel turning; this was one. Aeschylus had proudly
distinguished himself at Marathon; and Athens, as the highest
honor she could do him for that, must have his portrait appear in
the battle-picture painted for a memorial of the victory. He
fought, too, at Artemisium and Salamis; with equal distinction.
In 484 he won the first of thirteen annual successes in the
dramatic competitions. These were the years during which Athens
was really playing the hero; the years of Aristides' ascendency.
In 480 Xerxes burned the city; but the people fought on,
great in faith. In 479 came Plataea, Aeschylus again fighting.
Throughout this time, he, the Esotericist and Messenger of the
Gods, was wholly at one with his Athens--an Athens alive enough
then to the higher things to recognize the voice of the highest
when it spoke to her--to award Aeschylus, year after year, the
chief dramatic prize. Then in 478 or 477 she found herself in a
new position: her heroism and intelligence had won their reward,
and she was set at the head of Greece. Six years later Aeschylus
produced _The Persians,_ the first of the seven extant out of the
seventy or eighty plays he wrote; in it he is still absolutely
the patriotic Athenian. In 471 came the _Seven against Thebes;_
from which drama, I think, we get a main current of light on the
whole future history of Athens.
Two men, representing two forces, had guided the city during
those decades. On the one hand there was Aristides, called the
Just--inflexible, incorruptible, impersonal and generous; on the
other, Themistocles--precocious and wild as a boy; profligate as
a youth and young man; ambitious, unscrupulous and cruel; a
genius; a patriot; without moral sense. The policy of Aristides,
despite his so-called democratic reforms, was conservative; he
persuaded Greece, by sound arguments, to the side of Athens: he
was for Athens doing her duty by Greece, and remaining content.
That of Themistocles was that she should aim at empire by any
means: should make herself a sea-power with a view to dominating
the Greek world. Oh, to begin with, doubtless with a view to
holding back the Persians; and so far his policy was sane enough;
but his was not the kind of mind in which an ambitious idea fails
to develop in ambitious and greedy directions; and that of
mastery of the seas was an idea that could not help developing
fatally. He had been banished for his corruption in 471; but he
had set Athens on blue water, and bequeathed to her his policy.
Henceforward she was to make for supremacy, never counting the
moral cost. She attacked the islands at her pleasure, conquered
them, and often treated the conquered with vile cruelty. The
_Seven against Thebes_ was directed by Aeschylus against the
Themistoclean, and in support of the Aristidean, policy.
Imperialistic ambitions, fast ripening in that third decade of
the fifth century, were opposed by the Messenger of the Gods.
His valor in four battles had set him among the national heroes;
he had been, in _The Persians,_ the laureate of Salamis; by the
sheer grandeur of his poetry he had won the prize thirteen times
in succession.--And by the bye, it is to the eternal credit of
Athenian intelligence that Athens, at one hearing of those
obscure, lofty and tremendous poems, should have appreciated
them, and with enthusiasm. Try to imagine _Samson Agonistes_ put
on the stage today; with no academical enthusiasts or eclat of
classicism to back it; but just put on before thirty thousand
sight-seers, learned and vulgar, statesman and cobbler, tinker
and poet; the mob all there; the groundlings far out-numbering
the elite:--and all not merely sitting out the play, but roused
to a frenzy of enthusiasm; and Milton himself, present and
acting, the hero of the day. That, despite Mr. Whistler and the
_Ten O'Clock_--seems really to have been the kind of thing that
happened in Athens. Tomides was there, with his companions--
little Tomides, the mender of bad soles--and intoxicated by the
grand poetry; understanding it, and never finding it tedious;--
poetry they had had no opportunity to study in advance, they
understood and appreciated wildly at first hearing. One cannot
imagine it among moderns.--And Milton is clear as daylight beside
remote and difficult Aeschylus. To catch the latter's thought, we
need the quiet of the study, close attention, reading and
re-reading; and though of course time has made him more difficult;
and we should have understood him better, with no more than our
present limited intelligence, had we been his countrymen and
contemporaries; yet it remains a standing marvel, and witness to
the far higher general intelligence of the men of Athens. The
human spirit was immensely nearer this plane; they were far more
civilized, in respect to mental culture, than we are. Why?--The
cycles have traveled downward; our triumphs are on a more brutal
plane; we are much farther from the light of the Mysteries than
they were.
And yet they were going wrong: the great cycle had begun
its down-trend; they were already preparing the way for our
fool-headed materialism. In the _Seven against Thebes_ Aeschylus
protested against the current of the age. Three years later,
Athens, impatient of criticism, turned on him.
He is acting in one of his own plays--one that been lost. He
gives utterance, down there in the arena, to certain words--
tremendous words, as always, we must suppose: words hurled out of
the heights of an angry eternity--
_"Aeschylus' bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood,"_
--and Athens, that used to thrill and go mad to such tones when
they proclaimed the godlike in her own soul and encouraged her to
grand aspirations--goes mad now in another sense. She has grown
used to hear warning in them, and something in alliance with her
own stifled conscience protesting against her wrong courses;
and such habituation rarely means acquiescence or soothed
complacency. Now she is smitten and stung to the quick. A yell
from the mob; uproar; from the tiers above tiers they butt,
lurch, lunge, pour forward and down: the tinkers and cobblers,
demagogs and demagoged: intent--yes--to kill. But he, having yet
something to say, takes refuge at the altar; and there even a
maddened mob dare not molest him. But the prize goes to a rising
star, young Sophocles; and presently the Gods' Messenger is
formally accused and tried for "Profanation of the Mysteries."
Revealing secrets pertaining to them, in fact. And now note this:
his defense is that he did not know that his lines revealed any
secret--was unaware that what he had said pertained to the
Mysteries. Could he have urged such a plea, had it not been known
he was uninitiated? Could he have known the teachings, had he not
been instructed in a school where they were known? He, then, was
an initiate of the Pythagoreans, the new Theosophical Movement
upon the new method; not of Orthodox Eleusis, that had grown old
and comatose rather, and had ceased to count.--Well, the judges
were something saner than the mob; memory turned again to
what he had done at Marathon, what at Arternisium and Plataea;
to his thirteen solid years of victory (national heroism on
poetico-dramatic fields); and to that song of his that "saved
at Salamis":
_"O Sons of Greeks, go set your country free!"_
--and he was acquitted: Athens had not yet fallen so low as to
prepare a hemlock cup for her teacher. But meanwhile he would do
much better among his old comrades in Sicily than at home; and
thither he went.
He returned in 458, to find the Age of Pericles in full swing;
with all made anew, or in the making; and the time definitely
set on its downward course. 'Reform' was busy at abolishing
institutions once held sacred; was the rage;--that funeral speech
of Pericles, with its tactless vaunting of Athenian superiority
to all other possible men and nations, should tell us something.
When folk get to feel like that, God pity and forgive them!--it
is hard enough for mere men to. Aeschylus smote at imperialism in
the _Agamemnon_--the first play of this last of his trilogies;
and at the mania for reforming away sacred institutions in the
_Eumenides_--where he asserts the divine origin of the threatened
Areopagus. Popular feeling rose once more against him, and he
returned to Sicily to die.
Like so many another of his royal line, apparently a failure.
And indeed, a failure he was, so far as his Athens was concerned.
True, Athenian artistic judgment triumphed presently over the
Athenian spite. Though it was the rule that no successful play
should be performed more than once, they decreed that 'revivals'
of Aeschylus should always be in order. And Aristophanes
testifies to his lasting popularity--when he shows little Tomides
with a bad grouch over seeing a play by Theognis, when he had
gone to the theater "expecting Aeschylus";--and when he shows
Aeschylus and Euripides winning, because his poetry had died with
him, and so he had it there for a weapon--whereas Aeschylus's was
still alive and on earth. Yes; Athens took him again, and
permanently, into favor: took the poet, but not the Messenger
and his message. For she had gone on the wrong road in spite of
him: she had let the divine force, the influx of the human
spirit which had come to her as her priceless cyclic opportunity,
flow down from the high planes proper to it, on to the plane of
imperialism and vulgar ambition; and his word had been spoken to
the Greeks in vain--as all Greek history and Karma since has been
proclaiming. But in sooth he was not merely for an age, but for
all time; and his message, unlike Pindar's whom all Greece
worshiped, and far more than Homer's or that of Sophocles--is
vital today. Aeschylus, and Plato, and Socrates who speaks
through Plato, and Pythagoras who speaks through all of them, are
the Greeks whose voices are lifted forever for the Soul.
Even the political aspect of his message--the only one I have
touched on--is vital. It proclaims a truth that underlies all
history: one, I suspect, that remains for our Theosophical
Movement to impress on the general world-consciousness so that
wars may end: namely, that the impulse of Nationalism is a holy
thing, foundationed upon the human spirit: a means designed by
the Law for humanity's salvation. But like all spiritual forces,
it must be kept pure and spiritual, or instead of saving, it will
damn. In its inception, it is vision of the Soul: of the Racial
or National Soul--which is a divine light to lure us away from
the plane of personality, to obliterate our distressing and
private moods; to evoke the divine actor in us, and merge us in
a consciousness vastly greater than out own. But add to that
saving truth this damning corolary: _I am better than thou; my
race than thine; we have harvests to reap at your expense, and
our rights may be your wrongs:_--and you have, though it appear
not for awhile, fouled that stream from godhood:--you have
debased your nationalism and made it hellish. Upon your ambitions
and your strength, now in the time of your national flowering,
you may win to your desire, if you _will;_ because now the
spirit is quickening the whole fiber of your national self; and
the national will must become, under that pressure, almost
irresistibly victorious. The Peoples of the earth shall kneel
before your throne; you shall get your vulgar empire;--but you
shall get it presently, as they say, "where the chicken got the
axe": _Vengeance is mine, saith the Law; I will repay._ The
cycle, on the plane to which you have dragged it down, will run
its course; your high throne will go down with it, and yourself
shall kneel to races you now sniff at for 'inferior.' You have
brought it on to the material plane, and are now going upward on
its upward trend there gaily--
"Ah, let no evil lust attack the host
Conquered by greed, to plunder what they ought not;
For yet they need return in safety home,
Doubling the goal to run their backward race"
[_Agamemnon,_ Plumtre's translation]
The downtrend of the cycle awaits you--the other half--just as
the runner in the foot-races to win, must round the pillar at the
far end of the course, and return to the starting-place.--That is
among the warnings Aeschylus spoke in the _Agamemnon_ to an
Athens that was barefacedly conquering and enslaving the Isles of
Greece to no end but her own wealth and power and glory. The
obvious reference is of course to the conquerors of Troy.
I have spoken of this Oresteian Trilogy as his _Hamlet;_ with the
_Prometheus Bound_--another tremendous Soul-Symbol--it is
what puts him in equal rank with the four supreme Masters of
later Western Literature. I suppose it is pretty certain that
Shakespeare knew nothing of him, and had never heard of the plot
of his _Agamemnon._ But look here:--
There was one Hamlet King of Denmark, absent from control of his
kingdom because sleeping within his orchard (his custom always of
an afternoon). And there was one Agamemnon King of Men, absent
from control of his kingdom because leading those same Men at the
siege of Troy. Hamlet had a wife Gertrude; Agamemnon had a wife
Clytemnestra. Hamlet had a brother Claudius; who became the lover
of Gertrude. Agamemnon had a cousin Aegisthos, who became the
paramour of Clytemnestra. Claudius murdered Hamlet, and thereby
came by his throne and queen. Clytemnestra and Aegisthos murdered
Agamemnon, and Aegisthos thereby became possessed of his throne
and queen. Hamlet and Gertrude had a son Hamlet, who avenged his
father's murder. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had a son Orestes,
who avenged his father's murder.
There, however, the parallel ends. Shakespeare had to paint the
human soul at a certain stage of its evolution: the 'moment of
choice,' the entering on the path: and brought all his genius to
bear on revealing that. He had, here, to teach Karma only
incidentally; in _Macbeth,_ when the voice cried 'Sleep no
more!' he is more Aeschylean in spirit. That dreadful voice
rings through Aeschylus; who was altogether obsessed with the
majesty and awfulness of Karma. It is what he cried to Athens
then, and to all ages since, reiterating _Karma_ with terrible
sleep-forbidding insistency from dark heights.--I have quoted the
wonderful line in which Browning, using similes borrowed from
Aeschylus himself, sums up the effect of his style:
'Aeschylus' bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood,'
which compensates for the more than Greek--unintelligibility of
Browning's version of the _Agamemnon:_ it gives you some color,
some adumbration of the being and import of the man. How shall we
compare him with those others, his great compeers on the Mountain
of Song? Shakespeare--as I think--throned upon a peak where are
storms often, but where the sun shines mostly; surveying all
this life, and with an eye to the eternal behind: Dante--a
prophet, stern, proud, glad and sorrowful; ever in a great pride
of pain or agony of bliss; surveying the life without,--only to
correlate it with and interpret it by the vaster life within
that he knew better;--this Universe for him but the crust and
excoriata of the Universe of the Soul. Milton--a Titan Soul
hurled down from heaven, struggling with all chaos and the deep
to enunciate--just to proclaim and put on everlasting record--
those two profound significant words, _Titan_ and _Soul,_ for a
memorial to Man of the real nature of Man. Aeschylus--the
barking of an eagle--of Zeus the Thunderer's own eagle out of
ominous skies above the mountains: a thing unseen as Karma,
mysterious and mighty as Fate, as Disaster, as the final Triumph
of the Soul; sublime as death; a throat of bronze, superhumanly
impersonal; a far metallic clangor of sound, hoarse or harsh,
perhaps, if your delicate ears must call him so; but grand;
immeasurably grand; majestically, ominously and terribly grand;--
ancestral voices prophesying war, and doom, and all dark
tremendous destinies;--and yet he too with serenity and the
Prophecy of Peace and bliss for his last word to us: he will not
leave his avenging Erinyes until by Pallas' wand and will they
are transformed into Eumenides, bringers of good fortune.
Something like that, perhaps, is the impression Aeschylus leaves
on the minds of those who know him. They bear testimony to the
fact that, however grand his style--like a Milton Carlylized in
poetry--thought still seems to overtop it and to be struggling
for expression through a vehicle less than itself.
Says Lytton, not unwisely perhaps: "His genius is so near the
verge of bombast, that to approach his sublime is to rush into
the ridiculous"; and he goes on to say that you might find the
nearest echo of his diction in Shelley's _Prometheus;_ but of his
diction alone; for "his power is in concentration--that of
Shelley in diffuseness." "The intellectuality of Shelley," he
says, "destroyed; that of Aeschylus only increased his command
over the passions. The interest he excites is startling,
terrible, intense." Browning tried to bring over the style; but
left the thought, in an English _Double-Dutched,_ far remoter
than he found it from our understanding. The thought demands in
English a vehicle crystal-clear; but Aeschylus in the Greek is
not crystal-clear: so close-packed and vast are the ideas that
there are lines on lines of which the best scholars can only
conjecture the meaning.--In all this criticism, let me say, one
is but saying what has been said before; echoing Professor
Mahaffy; echoing Professor Gilbert Murray; but there is a need
to give you the best picture possible of this man speaking from
the eternal.--Unless Milton and Carlyle had co-operated to make
it, I think, any translation of the _Agamemnon_--which so many
have tried to translate--would be fatiguing and a great bore to
read. It may not be amiss to quote three lines from George Peel's
_David and Bethsabe,_ which have been often called Aeschylean
in audacity:--
"At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt,
And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings,
Sit ever burning on his hateful wings;"
His--the thunder's--fair spouse is the lightning. Imagine
images as swift, vivid and daring as that, hurled and flashed out
in language terse, sudden, lofty--and you may get an idea of what
this eagle's bark was like. And the word that came rasping and
resounding on it out of storm-skies high over Olympus, for Athens
then and the world since to hear, was KARMA.
He took that theme, and drove it home, and drove it home, and
drove it home. Athens disregarded the rights and sufferings of
others; was in fact abominably cruel. Well; she should hear about
Karma; and in such a way that she should--no, but she _should_--
give ear. Karma punished wrong-doing. It was wrong-doing that
Karma punished. You could not do wrong with impunity.--The common
thought was that any extreme of good fortune was apt to rouse the
jealousy of the Gods, and so bring on disaster. This was what
Pindar taught--all-worshiped prosperous Pindar, Aeschylus'
contemporary, the darling poet of the Greeks. The idea is
illustrated by Herodotus' story of the Ring of Polycrates.
You remember how the latter, being tyrant of Samos, applied to
Amasis of Egypt for an alliance. But wary Amasis, noting his
invariable good luck, advised him to sacrifice something, lest
the Gods should grow jealous: so Polycrates threw a ring into
the sea, with the thought thus to appease Nemesis cheaply; but
an obliging fish allowed itself to be caught and served up for
his supper with the ring in its internal economy; on hearing of
which, wary Amasis foresaw trouble, and declined the alliance
with thanks. Such views or feelings had come to be Greek
orthodoxy; you may take it that whatever Pindar said was not far
from the orthodoxies--hence his extreme popularity: we dearly
love a man who tells us grandly what we think ourselves, and
think it right to think. But such a position would not do for
Aeschylus. He noted his doctrine only to condemn it.
"There live an old saw framed in ancient days
In memories of men, that high estate,
Full grown, brings forth its young, nor childless dies,
But that from good success
Springs to the race a woe insatiable.
But I, apart from all,
Hold this my creed alone:
Ill deeds along bring forth offspring of ill
Like to their parent stock."
Needless to say the translation--Dean Plumptre's in the main--
fails to bring out the force of the original.
We must remember that for his audiences the story he had to tell
was not the important thing. They knew it in advance; it was
one of their familiar legends. What they went to hear was
Aeschylus' treatment of it; his art, his poetry, his preaching.
That was what was new to them: the thing for which their eyes
and ears were open. We go to the theater, as we read novels, for
amusement; the Athenians went for aesthetic and religious ends.
So Aechylus had ready for him an efficient pulpit; and was not
suspect for using it. We like Movies shows because they are
entertaining and exciting; the Athenian would have damned them
because they are inartistic.
I said, he had a pulpit ready for him; yet, as nearly as such a
statement can come to truth, it was he himself who invented the
drama. It was, remember, an age of transition: things were
passing out from the inner planes: the Mysteries were losing
their virtue. The Egyptian Mysteries had been dramatic in
character; the Eleusinian, which were very likely borrowed or
copied or introduced from Egypt, were no doubt dramatic too.
Then there had been festivals among the rustics, chiefly in
honor of Dionysos not altogether in his higher aspects, with
rudimentary plays of a coarse buffoonish character. By 499, in
Athens, these had grown to something more important; in that
year the wooden scaffolding of the theater in which they were
given broke down under the spectators; and this led to the
building of a new theater in stone. It was in 499 Aeschylus first
competed; the show was still very rudimentary in character. Then
he went off to Sicily; and came back with the idea conceived of
Greek Tragedy as an artistic vehicle or expression--and something
more. He taught the men who had at first defeated him, how to do
their later and better work; and opened the way for all who came
after, from Sophocles to Racine. He took to sailing this new ship
of the drama as near as he might to the shore-line of the
Mysteries themselves;--indeed, he did much more than this; for he
infused into his plays that wine of divine life then to be found
in its purity and vigor only or chiefly in the Pythagorean
Brotherhood.--And now as to this new art-form of his.
De Quincey, accepting the common idea that the Dionysian Theater
was built to seat between thirty and forty thousand spectators
(every free Athenian citizen), argues that the formative elements
that made Greek Tragedy what it was were derived from these huge
dimensions. In such a vast building (he asks) how could you
produce such a play as _Hamlet?_--where the art of the actor
shows itself in momentary changes of expression, small byplay
that would be lost, and the like. The figures would be dwarfed by
the distances; stage whispers and the common inflexions of the
speaking voice would be lost. So none of these things belonged to
Greek Tragedy. The mere physical scale necessitated a different
theory of art. The stature of the actors had to be increased, or
they would have looked like pygmies; their figures had to be
draped and muffled, to hide the unnatural proportions thus
given them. A mask had to be worn, if only to make the head
proportionate to the body; and the mask had to contain an
arrangement for multiplying the voice, that it might carry to the
whole audience. That implied that the lines should be chanted,
not spoken;--though in any case, chanted they would be, for they
were verse, not prose; and the Greeks had not forgotten, as we
have, that verse is meant to be chanted. So here, to begin with,
the whole scheme implied something as unlike actual life as it
well could be. And then, too, there was the solemnity of the
occasion--the religious nature of the whole festival.
Thus, in substance De Quincey; who makes too little, perhaps,
of the matter of that last sentence; and too much of what
goes before. We may say that it was rather the grand impersonal
theory of the art that created the outward condition; not the
conditions that created the theory. Mahaffy went to Athens and
measured the theater; and found it not so big by any means. They
could have worked out our theories and practice in it, had they
wanted to, so far as that goes. Coarse buffoonish country
festivals do not of themselves evolve into grand art or solemn
occasions; you must seek a cause for that evolution, and find it
in an impulse arisen in some human mind. Or minds indeed; for
such impulses are very mysterious. The Gods sow their seed in
season; we do not see the sowing, but presently mark the
greening of the brown earth. The method of the Mysteries--drama
serious and religious--had been drifting outwards: things had
been growing to a point where a great creative Soul could take
hold of them and mold them to his wish. If Aeschylus was not an
Initiate of Eleusis, he had learnt, with the Pythagoreans, the
method of the Mysteries of all lands. He knew more, not less,
than the common pillars of the Athenian Church and State. I
imagine it was he, in those thirteen consecutive years of his
victories, who in part created, in part drew from his Pythagorean
knowledge, those conventions and circumstances for Tragedy which
suited him--rather than that conventions already existing imposed
formative limits on him. His genius was aloof, impersonal,
severe, and of the substance of the Eternal; such as would need
precisely those conventions, and must have created them had they
not been there. Briefly, I believe that this is what happened.
Sent by Pythagoras to do what he could for Athens and Greece, he
forged this mighty bolt of tragedy to be his weapon.
The theory of modern drama is imitation of life. It has
nothing else and higher to offer; so, when it fails to imitate,
we call it trash. But the theory of Aeschylean Tragedy
is the illumination of life. Illumination of life, through
a medium quite unlike life. Art begins on a spiritual plane,
and works down to realism in its decadence; then it ceases
to be art at all, and becomes merely copying what we imagine
to be nature,--nature, often, as seen through a diseased liver
and well-atrophied pineal gland.
True art imitates nature only in a very selective and limited
way. It chooses carefully what it shall imitate, and all to the
end of illumination. It paints a flower, or a sunset, not to
reproduce the thing seen with the eyes, but to declare and set
forth that mood of the Oversoul which the flower or the sunset
expressed. Flower-colors or sunset-colors cannot be reproduced
in pigments; but you can do things with pigments and a brush that
can tell the same story. Or it can be done in words, in a poem;
or with the notes of music;--in both of which cases the medium
used is still more, and totally, unlike the medium through which
the Oversoul said its say in the sky or the blossom.
Nature is always expressing these moods of the Oversoul; but we
get no news of them, as a rule, from our own sight and hearing;
we must wait for the poets and artists to interpret them. Life
is always at work to teach us life; but we miss the grand
lessons, usually, until some human Teacher enforces them. His
methods are the same as those of the artists: between whose
office and his there was at first no difference;--_Bard_
means only, originally, an Adept Teacher. Such a one selects
experiences out of life for his pupils, and illumines them
through the circumstances under which they are applied; just as
the true artist selects objects from nature, and by his manner of
treating them, interprets the greatness that lies beyond.
So the drama-theory of Aeschylus. He took fragments of possible
experience, and let them be seen through a heightened and
interpretative medium; with a light at once intense and somber-
portentous thrown on them; and this not to reproduce the
externalia and appearance of life, but to illumine its inner
recesses; to enforce, in plays lasting an hour or so, the
lessons life may take many incarnations to teach. This cannot be
done by realism, imitation or reproduction of the actual; than
which life itself is always better.
What keeps us from seeing the meanings of life? Personality.
Not only our own, but in all those about us. Personality dodges
and flickers always between our eyes and the solemn motions, the
adumbrations of the augustness beyond. We demand lots of
personality in our drama; we call it character-drawing. We want
to see fellows like ourselves lounging or bustling about, and
hear them chattering as we do;--fellows with motives (like our
own) all springing from the personality. Human life is what
interests us: we desire to drink deep of it, and drink again and
again. The music that we wish to hear is the "still, sad music
of humanity";--that is, taking our theory at its best, and before
you come down to sheer 'jazz' and ragtime. But what interested
Aeschylus was that which lies beyond and within life. He said:
'You can get life in the Agora, on the Acropolis, any day of the
week; when you come to the theater you shall have something
else, and greater.'
So he set his scenes, either in a vast, remote, and mysterious
antiquity, or--in _The Persians_--at Susa before the palace of
the Great King: a setting as remote, splendid, vast, and
mysterious, to the Greek mind of the day, as the other. Things
should not be as like life, but as unlike life, as possible. The
plays themselves, as acted, were a combination of poetry, dance,
statuesque poses and motions and groupings; there was no action.
All the action was done off the scenes. They did not portray the
evolution of character; they hardly portrayed character--in the
personal sense--at all. The _dramatis personae_ are types,
symbols, the expression of natural forces, or principles in man.
In our drama you have a line, an extension forward in time; a
progression from this to that point in time;--in Greek Tragedy
you have a cross-section of time--a cutting through the atom of
time that glimpses may be caught of eternity. There was no
unfoldment of a story; but the presentation of a single mood.
In the chanted poetry and the solemn dance-movements a situation
was set forth; what led up to it being explained retrospectively.
The audience knew what was coming as well as the author did:
that Agamemnon, for instance, was to be murdered. So all
was written to play on their expectations, not on their surprise.
There was a succession of perfect pictures; these and the
poetry were to hold the interest, to work it up: to seize
upon the people, and lead them by ever-heightening accessions
of feeling into forgetfulness of their personal lives, and
absorption in the impersonal harmony, the spiritual receptivity,
from which the grand truths are visible. The actors' masks
allowed only the facial expression of a single mood; and
it was a single mood the dramatist aimed to produce: a unity;
one great word. There could be no grave-diggers; no quizzing
of Polonious; no clouds very like a whale. The whole drama
is the unfoldment of a single moment: that, say, in which
Hamlet turns on Caudius and kills him--rather, leads him out to
kill him. To that you are led by a little sparse dialog, ominous
enough, and pregnant with dire significance, between two or three
actors; many long speeches in which the story is told in
retrospect; much chanting by the chorus--Horatio multiplied by a
dozen or so--to make you feel Hamlet's long indecision, and to
allow you no escape from the knowledge that Claudius' crime
would bring about its karmic punishment. It is a unity: one
thunderbolt from Zeus;--first the growl and rumbling of the
thunders; then the whirr of the dread missile,--and lo, the man
dead that was to die. And through the bolt so hurled, so
effective, and with it--the eagle-bark--Aeschylus crying _Karma!_
to the Athenians.
So it has been said that Aeschylean Tragedy is more nearly allied
to sculpture; Shakespearean Tragedy to the Epic.
Think how that unchanging mask, that frozen moment of expression,
would develop the quality of tragic irony. In it Clytemnestra
comes out to greet the returning Agamemnon. She has her
handmaids carpet the road for him with purple tapestries; she
makes her speeches of welcome; she alludes to the old sacrifice
of Iphigenia; she tells him how she has waited for his return;--
and all the while the audience knows she is about to kill him.
They listen to her doubtful words, in which she reveals to them,
who know both already, her faithlessness and dire purpose; but
to her husband, seems to reveal something different altogether.
With Agamemnon comes Cassandra from fallen Troy: whose fate was
to foresee all woes and horror, and to forthtell what she saw--
and never to be believed; so now when she raises her dreadful
cry, foreseeing what is about to happen, and uttering warning--
none believe her but the audience, who know it all in advance.
And then there are the chantings of the chorus, a group of Argive
elders. They know or guess how things stand between the queen
and her lover; they express their misgiving, gathering as the
play goes on; they recount the deeds of violence of which the
House of Atreus has been the scene, and are haunted by the
foreshadowings of Karma. But they many not understand or
give credence to the warnings of Cassandra: Karma disallows
fore-fending against the fall of its bolts. Troy has fallen, they
say: and that was Karma; because Paris, and Troy in supporting
him, had sinned against Zeus the patron of hospitality,--to whom
the offense rose like vultures with rifled nest, wheeling in
mid-heaven on strong oars of wings, screaming for retribution.
--You may not that Aeschylus' freedom from the bonds of outer
religion is like Shakespeare's own: here Zeus figures as symbol
of the Lords of Karma; from him flow the severe readjustments
of the Law;--but in the _Prometheus Bound_ he stands for the
lower nature that crucifies the Higher.
Troy, then, had sinned, and has fallen; but (says the Chorus)
let the conquerors look to it that they do not overstep the mark;
let there be no dishonoring the native Gods of Troy; (the
Athenians had been very considerably overstepping the mark
in some of their own conquests recently;)--let there be no
plundering or useless cruelty; (the Athenians had been hideously
greedy and cruel;)--or Karma would overtake it own agents, the
Greeks, who were not yet out of the wood, as we say--who had not
yet returned home. This was when the beacons had announced the
fall of Troy, and before the entry of Agamemnon.
Clytemnestra is not like Gertrude, but a much grander and more
tragical figure. Shakespeare leaves you in no doubt as to his
queen's relation to Claudius; he enlarges on their guilty
passion _ad lib._ Aeschylus never mentions love at all in
any of his extant plays; only barely hints at it here. It
may be supposed to exist; it is an accessory motive; it
lends irony to Clytemnestra's welcome to Agamemnon--in which
only the audience and the Chorus are aware that the lady
does protest too much. But she stands forth in her own eyes
as an agent of Karma-Nemesis; there is something very terrible
and unhuman about her. Early in the play she reminds the
Chorus how Agamemnon, is setting out for Troy, sacrificed
his and her daughter Iphigenia to get a fair wind: a deed
of blood whose consequences must be feared--something to
add to the Chorus's misgivings, as they chant their doubtful
hope that the king may safely return. In reality Artemis
had saved Igphigenia; and though Clytemnestra did not know
this, in assuming the position of her daughter's avenger
she put herself under the karmic ban. And Agamemnon did
not know it: he had intended the sacrifice: and was therefore,
and for his supposed ruthlessness at Troy, under the same ban
himself. Hence the fate that awaited him on his return; and
hence because of Clytemnestra's useless crime--when she and
Aegisthos come out from murdering him, and announce what they
have done, the Chorus's dark foretellings--to come true presently
--of the Karma that is to follow upon it.
And here we must guard ourselves against the error--as I think it
is that Aeschylus set himself to create the perfect and final
art-form as such. I think he was just intent on announcing Karma
to the Athenians in the most effective way possible: bent all
his energies to making that--and that the natural result
of that high issue clear and unescapable; purpose was this
marvelous art-form--which Sophocles took up later, and in
some external ways perhaps perfected. Then came Aristotle after
a hundred years, and defining the results achieved, tried to make
Shakespeare impossible. The truth is that when you put yourself
to do the Soul's work, and have the great forces of the Soul to
back you therein, you create an art-form; and it only remains for
the Aristotelian critic to define it. Then back comes the Soul
after a thousand years, makes a new one, and laughs at the
Aristotles. The grand business is done by following the Soul--not
by conforming to rules or imitating models. But it must be the
Soul; rules and models are much better than personal whims;
they are a discipline good to be followed as long as one can.--
You will note how Aeschylus stood above the possibilities of
actualism with which we so much concern ourselves; in the course
of some sixteen hundred lines, and without interval or change of
act or scene, he introduces the watchman on the house-top who
first sees the beacons that announce the fall of Troy, on the
very night that Troy fell,--and the return of Agamemnon in his
chariot to Argos.
In the _Choephori_ or _Libation-Pourers,_ the second play of the
trilogy, Orestes returns from his Wittenberg, sent by Apollo to
avenge his father. The scene again is in front of the house of
Atreus. Having killed Aegistlios within, Orestes comes out to
the Chorus; then Clytemnestra enters; he tells her what he has
done, and what he intends to do; and despite her pleadings,
leads her in to die beside her paramour. He comes out again,
bearing (for his justification) the blood-stained robe of
Agamemnon;--but he comes out distraught and with the guilt of
matricide weighing on his soul. The Chorus bids him be of good
cheer, reminding him upon what high suggestion he has acted; but
in the background he, and he alone, sees the Furies swarming to
haunt him, "like Gorgons, dark-robed, and all their tresses hang
entwined with many serpents; and from their eyes is dropping
loathsome blood." He must wander the world seeking purification.
In the _Eumenides_ we find him in the temple of Loxias (the
Apollo) at Delphi, there seeking refuge with the god who had
prompted him to the deed. But even there the Furies haunt him--
though for weariness--or really because it is the shrine of
Loxias--they have fallen asleep. From them even Loxias may not
free him; only perhaps Pallas at Athens may do that; Loxias
announces this to him and bids him go to Athens, and assures him
meanwhile of his protection.
To Athens then the scene changes, where Orestes' case is tried:
Apollo defends him; Pallas is the judge; the Furies the
accusers; the Court of the Areopagus the jury. The votes of
these are equally divided; but Athene gives her casting vote in
his favor; and to compensate the Erinyes, turns them into
Eumenides--from Furies to goddesses of good omen and fortune.
Orestes is free, and the end is happy.
No doubt very pretty and feeble of the bronze-throated Eagle-
barker to make it so. What! clap on an exit to these piled-up
miseries?--he should have plunged us deeper in woe, and left us
to stew in our juices; he Should have shunned this detestable
effeminacy, worthy only of the Dantes and Shakespeares. But
unfortunately he was an Esotericist, with the business of
helping, not plaguing, mankind: he must follow the grand
symbolism of the story of the Soul, recording and emphasizing and
showing the way to its victories, not its defeats. He had the eye
to see deep into realities, and was not to be led from the path
of truth eternal by the cheap effective expedients of realism.
He must tell the whole truth: building up, not merely destroying;
and truth, at the end, is not bitter, but bright and glorious.
It is the triumph and purification of the soul; and to that
happy consummation all sorrow and darkness and the dread Furies
themselves, whom he paints with all the dark flame-pigments
of sheerest terror, are but incidental and a means.
And the meaning of it all? Well, the meaning is as vast as the
scheme of evolution itself, I suppose. It is _Hamlet_ over
again, and treated differently; that which wrote _Hamlet_
through Shakespeare, wrote this Trilogy through Aeschylus. I
imagine you are to find in the _Agamemnon_ the symbol of the
Spirit's fall into matter--of the incarnation (and obscuration)
of the Lords of Mind--driven thereto by ancient Karma, and the
result--of the life of past universes. Shakespeare deals with
this retrospectively, in the Ghost's words to Hamlet on the
terrace. The 'death' of the Spirit is its fall into matter.
And just as the ghost urges Hamlet to revenge, so Apollo urges
Orestes; it is the influx, stir, or impingement of the Supreme
Self, that rouses a man, at a certain stage in his evolution,
to lift himself above his common manhood. This is the most
interesting and momentous event in the long career of the soul:
it takes the place, in that drama of incarnations, that the
marriage does in the modern novel. Shakespeare, whose mental
tendencies were the precise opposite of Aeschylus's--they ran to
infinite multiplicity and complexity, where the other's ran to
stern unity and simplicity (of plot)--made two characters of
Polonius and Gertrude: Polonius,--the objective lower world,
with its shallow wisdom and conventions; Gertrude,--Nature, the
lower world in it subjective or inner relation to the soul
incarnate in it. Aeschylus made no separate symbol for the former.
Shakespeare makes the killing of Polonius a turning-point;
thenceforth Hamlet must, will he nill he, in some dawdling
sort sweep to his revenge. Aeschylus makes that same turning-point
in the killing of Clytemnestra, whereafter the Furies are let
loose on Orestes. If you think well what it means, it is
that "leap" spoken of in _Light on the Path,_ by which a
man raises himself "on to the path of individual accomplishment
instead of mere obedience to the genii which rule our earth."
He can no longer walk secure like a sheep in the flock; he
has come out, and is separate; he has chosen a captain within,
and must follow the Soul, and not outer convention. That
step taken, and the face set towards the Spirit-Sun--the
life of the world forgone, that a way may be fought into
the Life of the Soul:--all his past lives and their errors
rise against him; his passions are roused to fight for their
lives, and easy living is no longer possible. He must fly
then for refuge to Loxias the Sun-God, the Supreme Self, who can
protect him from these Erinyes--but it is Pallas, Goddess of the
Inner Wisdom, of the true method of life, that can alone set him
free. And it is thus that Apollo pleads before her for Orestes
who killed his mother (Nature) to avenge his Father (Spirit):--a
man, says he, is in reality the child of his father, not of his
mother:--this lower world in which we are incarnate is not in
truth our parent or originator at all, but only the seed-plot in
which we, sons of the Eternal, are sown, the nursery in which we
grow to the point of birth;--but we ourselves are in our essence
flame of the Flame of God. So Pallas--and you must think of all
she implied--Theosophy, right living, right thought and action,
true wisdom--judges Orestes guiltless, sets him free, and
transforms his passions into his powers.