[1] '_When sown_;' as it has been repeatedly; a fact which some
readers may not be aware of.
[2] Boileau, it is true, translated Longinus. But there goes little Greek
to _that_. It is in dealing with Attic Greek, and Attic _poets_,
that a man can manifest his Grecian skill.
[3] 'Before God was known;'--i.e. known in Greece.
[4] At times, I say pointedly, the _Athenian_ rather than the
_Grecian_ tragedy, in order to keep the reader's attention awake to a
remark made by Paterculus,--viz. That although Greece coquettishly
welcomed homage to herself, as generally concerned in the Greek
literature, in reality Athens only had any original share in the drama, or
in the oratory of Greece.
[5] '_The supreme artist_:'--It is chiefly by comparison with Euripides,
that Sophocles is usually crowned with the laurels of _art_. But there is
some danger of doing wrong to the truth in too blindly adhering to these
old rulings of critical courts. The judgments would sometimes be reversed,
if the pleadings were before us. There were blockheads in those days.
Undoubtedly it is past denying that Euripides at times betrays marks of
carelessness in the structure of his plots, as if writing too much in a
hurry: the original cast of the fable is sometimes not happy, and the
evolution or disentangling is too precipitate. It is easy to see that he
would have remoulded them in a revised edition, or _diaskeue [Greek.]_ On
the other hand, I remember nothing in the Greek drama more worthy of a
great artist than parts in his Phoenissae. Neither is he the effeminately
tender, or merely pathetic poet that some people imagine. He was able to
sweep _all_ the chords of the impassioned spirit. But the whole of this
subject is in arrear: it is in fact _res integra_, almost unbroken ground.
[6] I see a possible screw loose at this point: if _you_ see it, reader,
have the goodness to hold your tongue.
[7] '_Athenian Theatre_:'--Many corrections remain to be made. Athens, in
her bloom, was about as big as Calcutta, which contained, forty years ago,
more than half a million of people; or as Naples, which (being long rated
at three hundred thousand), is now known to contain at least two hundred
thousand more. The well known census of Demetrius Phalereus gave twenty-
one thousand citizens. Multiply this by 5, or 4-3/4, and you have their
families. Add ten thousand, multiplied by 4-1/2, for the _Inquilini_. Then
add four hundred thousand for the slaves: total, about five hundred and
fifty thousand. But upon the fluctuations of the Athenian population there
is much room for speculation. And, quaere, was not the population of
Athens greater two centuries before Demetrius, in the days of Pericles?
[8] Having no Sophocles at hand, I quote from memory, not pretending
therefore to exactness: but the sense is what I state.
[9] _Whose_ version, I do not know. But one unaccountable error was
forced on one's notice. _Thebes_, which, by Milton and by every scholar is
made a monosyllable, is here made a dissyllable. But _Thebez_, the
dissyllable, is a _Syrian_ city. It is true that Causabon deduces from a
Syriac word meaning a case or enclosure (a _theca_), the name of Thebes,
whether Boeotian or Egyptian. It is probable, therefore, that Thebes the
hundred-gated of Upper Egypt, Thebes the seven-gated of Greece, and Thebes
of Syria, had all one origin as regards the name. But this matters not; it
is the _English_ name that we are concerned with.
[10] '_False_:' or rather inaccurate. The burlesque was not on the
Antigone, but on the Medea of Euripides; and very amusing.
[11] But in this instance, perhaps, distance of space, combined with the
unrivalled grandeur of the war, was felt to equiponderate the distance of
time, Susa, the Persian capital, being fourteen hundred miles from Athens.
[12] _[Greek: Sterna th'os agalmatos], her bosom as the bosom of a
statue_; an expression of Euripides, and applied, I think, to Polyxena
at the moment of her sacrifice on the tomb of Achilles, as the bride that
was being married to him at the moment of his death.
[13] Amongst the questions which occurred to me as requiring an answer, in
connection with this revival, was one with regard to the comparative
fitness of the Antigone for giving a representative idea of the Greek
stage. I am of opinion that it was the worst choice which could have been
made; and for the very reason which no doubt governed that choice, viz.--
because the austerity of the tragic passion is disfigured by a love
episode. Rousseau in his letter to D'Alembert upon his article _Geneve_,
in the French Encyclopedie, asks,--'_Qui est-ce qui doute que, sur nos
theatres, la meilleure piece de Sophocle ne tombat tout-a-plat?_' And his
reason (as collected from other passages) is--because an interest derived
from the passion of sexual love can rarely be found on the Greek stage,
and yet cannot be dispensed with on that of Paris. But why was it so rare
on the Greek stage? Not from accident, but because it did not harmonize
with the principle of that stage, and its vast overhanging gloom. It is
the great infirmity of the French, and connected constitutionally with the
gayety of their temperament, that they cannot sympathize with this
terrific mode of grandeur. We can. And for _us_ the choice should have
been more purely and severely Grecian; whilst the slenderness of the plot
in any Greek tragedy, would require a far more effective support from
tumultuous movement in the chorus. Even the French are not uniformly
insensible to this Grecian grandeur. I remember that Voltaire, amongst
many just remarks on the Electra of Sophocles, mixed with others that are
_not_ just, bitterly condemns this demand for a love fable on the French
stage, and illustrates its extravagance by the French tragedy on the same
subject, of Crebillon. He (in default of any more suitable resource) has
actually made Electra, whose character on the Greek stage is painfully
vindictive, in love with an imaginary son of Aegisthus, her father's
murderer. Something should also have been said of Mrs. Leigh Murray's
Ismene, which was very effective in supporting and in relieving the
magnificent impression of Antigone. I ought also to have added a note on
the scenic mask, and the common notion (not authorized, I am satisfied, by
the practice in the _supreme_ era of Pericles), that it exhibited a Janus
face, the windward side expressing grief or horror, the leeward expressing
tranquillity. Believe it not, reader. But on this and other points, it
will be better to speak circumstantially, in a separate paper on the Greek
drama, as a majestic but very exclusive and almost, if one may say so,
bigoted form of the scenic art.