concrete character of a picture, Dionysus, the old Greek god, as we
may discern him through a multitude of stray hints in art and poetry
and religious custom, through modern speculation on the tendencies of
early thought, through traits and touches in our own actual states of
mind, which may seem sympathetic with those tendencies. In such a
picture there must necessarily be a certain artificiality; things
near and far, matter of varying degrees of certainty, fact and
surmise, being reflected and concentrated, for its production, as if
on the surface of a mirror. Such concrete character, however, Greek
poet or sculptor, from time to time, impressed on the vague world of
popular belief and usage around him; and in the Bacchanals of
Euripides we have an example of the figurative or imaginative power
of poetry, selecting and combining, at will, from that mixed and
floating mass, weaving the many-coloured threads together, blending
the various phases of legend--all the light and shade of the [54]
subject--into a shape, substantial and firmly set, through which a
mere fluctuating tradition might retain a permanent place in men's
imaginations. Here, in what Euripides really says, in what we
actually see on the stage, as we read his play, we are dealing with a
single real object, not with uncertain effects of many half-fancied
objects. Let me leave you for a time almost wholly in his hands,
while you look very closely at his work, so as to discriminate its
outlines clearly.
This tragedy of the Bacchanals--a sort of masque or morality, as we
say--a monument as central for the legend of Dionysus as the Homeric
hymn for that of Demeter, is unique in Greek literature, and has also
a singular interest in the life of Euripides himself. He is writing
in old age (the piece was not played till after his death) not at
Athens, nor for a polished Attic audience, but for a wilder and less
temperately cultivated sort of people, at the court of Archelaus, in
Macedonia. Writing in old age, he is in that subdued mood, a mood
not necessarily sordid, in which (the shudder at the nearer approach
of the unknown world coming over him more frequently than of old)
accustomed ideas, conformable to a sort of common sense regarding the
unseen, oftentimes regain what they may have lost, in a man's
allegiance. It is a sort of madness, he begins to think, to differ
from the received opinions thereon. Not that he is insincere or
ironical, but that he tends, in the [55] sum of probabilities, to
dwell on their more peaceful side; to sit quiet, for the short
remaining time, in the reflexion of the more cheerfully lighted side
of things; and what is accustomed--what holds of familiar usage--
comes to seem the whole essence of wisdom, on all subjects; and the
well-known delineation of the vague country, in Homer or Hesiod,
one's best attainable mental outfit, for the journey thither. With
this sort of quiet wisdom the whole play is penetrated. Euripides
has said, or seemed to say, many things concerning Greek religion, at
variance with received opinion; and now, in the end of life, he
desires to make his peace--what shall at any rate be peace with men.
He is in the mood for acquiescence, or even for a palinode; and this
takes the direction, partly of mere submission to, partly of a
refining upon, the authorised religious tradition: he calmly
sophisticates this or that element of it which had seemed grotesque;
and has, like any modern writer, a theory how myths were made, and
how in lapse of time their first signification gets to be obscured
among mortals; and what he submits to, that he will also adorn
fondly, by his genius for words.
And that very neighbourhood afforded him his opportunity. It was in
the neighbourhood of Pella, the Macedonian capital, that the worship
of Dionysus, the newest of the gods, prevailed in its most
extravagant form--the [56] Thiasus, or wild, nocturnal procession of
Bacchic women, retired to the woods and hills for that purpose, with
its accompaniments of music, and lights, and dancing. Rational and
moderate Athenians, as we may gather from some admissions of
Euripides himself, somewhat despised all that; while those who were
more fanatical forsook the home celebrations, and went on pilgrimage
from Attica to Cithaeron or Delphi. But at Pella persons of high
birth took part in the exercise, and at a later period we read in
Plutarch how Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, was devoted
to this enthusiastic worship. Although in one of Botticelli's
pictures the angels dance very sweetly, and may represent many
circumstances actually recorded in the Hebrew scriptures, yet we
hardly understand the dance as a religious ceremony; the bare mention
of it sets us thinking on some fundamental differences between the
pagan religions and our own. It is to such ecstasies, however, that
all nature-worship seems to tend; that giddy, intoxicating sense of
spring--that tingling in the veins, sympathetic with the yearning
life of the earth, having, apparently, in all times and places,
prompted some mode of wild dancing. Coleridge, in one of his
fantastic speculations, refining on the German word for enthusiasm--
Schwärmerei, swarming, as he says, "like the swarming of bees
together"--has explained how the sympathies of mere numbers, as such,
the random catching on [57] fire of one here and another there, when
people are collected together, generates as if by mere contact, some
new and rapturous spirit, not traceable in the individual units of a
multitude. Such swarming was the essence of that strange dance of
the Bacchic women: literally like winged things, they follow, with
motives, we may suppose, never quite made clear even to themselves,
their new, strange, romantic god. Himself a woman-like god,--it was
on women and feminine souls that his power mainly fell. At Elis, it
was the women who had their own little song with which at spring-time
they professed to call him from the sea: at Brasiae they had their
own temple where none but women might enter; and so the Thiasus,
also, is almost exclusively formed of women--of those who experience
most directly the influence of things which touch thought through the
senses--the presence of night, the expectation of morning, the
nearness of wild, unsophisticated, natural things--the echoes, the
coolness, the noise of frightened creatures as they climbed through
the darkness, the sunrise seen from the hill-tops, the disillusion,
the bitterness of satiety, the deep slumber which comes with the
morning. Athenians visiting the Macedonian capital would hear, and
from time to time actually see, something of a religious custom, in
which the habit of an earlier world might seem to survive. As they
saw the lights flitting over the mountains, [58] and heard the wild,
sharp cries of the women, there was presented, as a singular fact in
the more prosaic actual life of a later time, an enthusiasm otherwise
relegated to the wonderland of a distant past, in which a supposed
primitive harmony and understanding between man and nature renewed
itself. Later sisters of Centaur and Amazon, the Maenads, as they
beat the earth in strange sympathy with its waking up from sleep, or
as, in the description of the Messenger, in the play of Euripides,
they lie sleeping in the glen, revealed among the morning mists, were
themselves indeed as remnants--flecks left here and there and not yet
quite evaporated under the hard light of a later and commoner day--of
a certain cloud-world which had once covered all things with a veil
of mystery. Whether or not, in what was often probably coarse as
well as extravagant, there may have lurked some finer vein of ethical
symbolism, such as Euripides hints at--the soberer influence, in the
Thiasus, of keen air and animal expansion, certainly, for art, and a
poetry delighting in colour and form, it was a custom rich in
suggestion. The imitative arts would draw from it altogether new
motives of freedom and energy, of freshness in old forms. It is from
this fantastic scene that the beautiful wind-touched draperies, the
rhythm, the heads suddenly thrown back, of many a Pompeian wall-
painting and sarcophagus-frieze are originally derived; and that
melting languor, that perfectly [59] composed lassitude of the fallen
Maenad, became a fixed type in the school of grace, the school of
Praxiteles.
The circumstances of the place thus combining with his peculiar
motive, Euripides writes the Bacchanals. It is this extravagant
phase of religion, and the latest-born of the gods, which as an
amende honorable to the once slighted traditions of Greek belief, he
undertakes to interpret to an audience composed of people who, like
Scyles, the Hellenising king of Scythia, feel the attraction of Greek
religion and Greek usage, but on their quainter side, and partly
relish that extravagance. Subject and audience alike stimulate the
romantic temper, and the tragedy of the Bacchanals, with its
innovations in metre and diction, expressly noted as foreign or
barbarous--all the charm and grace of the clear-pitched singing of
the chorus, notwithstanding--with its subtleties and sophistications,
its grotesques, mingled with and heightening a real shudder at the
horror of the theme, and a peculiarly fine and human pathos, is
almost wholly without the reassuring calm, generally characteristic
of the endings of Greek tragedy: is itself excited, troubled,
disturbing--a spotted or dappled thing, like the oddly dappled fawn-
skins of its own masquerade, so aptly expressive of the shifty,
twofold, rapidly-doubling genius of the divine, wild creature
himself. Let us listen and watch the strange masks coming and going,
for a while, [60] as far as may be as we should do with a modern
play. What are its charms? What is still alive, impressive, and
really poetical for us, in the dim old Greek play?
The scene is laid at Thebes, where the memory of Semele, the mother
of Dionysus, is still under a cloud. Her own sisters, sinning
against natural affection, pitiless over her pathetic death and
finding in it only a judgment upon the impiety with which, having
shamed herself with some mortal lover, she had thrown the blame of
her sin upon Zeus, have, so far, triumphed over her. The true and
glorious version of her story lives only in the subdued memory of the
two aged men, Teiresias the prophet, and her father Cadmus, apt now
to let things go loosely by, who has delegated his royal power to
Pentheus, the son of one of those sisters--a hot-headed and impious
youth. So things had passed at Thebes; and now a strange
circumstance has happened. An odd sickness has fallen upon the
women: Dionysus has sent the sting of his enthusiasm upon them, and
has pushed it to a sort of madness, a madness which imitates the true
Thiasus. Forced to have the form without the profit of his worship,
the whole female population, leaving distaff and spindle, and headed
by the three princesses, have deserted the town, and are lying
encamped on the bare rocks, or under the pines, among the solitudes
of Cithaeron. And it is just at this point that the divine child,
[61] supposed to have perished at his mother's side in the flames,
returns to his birthplace, grown to manhood.
Dionysus himself speaks the prologue. He is on a journey through the
world to found a new religion; and the first motive of this new
religion is the vindication of the memory of his mother. In
explaining this design, Euripides, who seeks always for pathetic
effect, tells in few words, touching because simple, the story of
Semele--here, and again still more intensely in the chorus which
follows--the merely human sentiment of maternity being not forgotten,
even amid the thought of the divine embraces of her fiery bed-fellow.
It is out of tenderness for her that the son's divinity is to be
revealed. A yearning affection, the affection with which we see him
lifting up his arms about her, satisfied at last, on an old Etruscan
metal mirror, has led him from place to place: everywhere he has had
his dances and established his worship; and everywhere his presence
has been her justification. First of all the towns in Greece he
comes to Thebes, the scene of her sorrows: he is standing beside the
sacred waters of Dirce and Ismenus: the holy place is in sight: he
hears the Greek speech, and sees at last the ruins of the place of
her lying-in, at once his own birth-chamber and his mother's tomb.
His image, as it detaches itself little by little from the episodes
of the play, and is further characterised by the [62] songs of the
chorus, has a singular completeness of symbolical effect. The
incidents of a fully developed human personality are superinduced on
the mystical and abstract essence of that fiery spirit in the flowing
veins of the earth--the aroma of the green world is retained in the
fair human body, set forth in all sorts of finer ethical lights and
shades--with a wonderful kind of subtlety. In the course of his long
progress from land to land, the gold, the flowers, the incense of the
East, have attached themselves deeply to him: their effect and
expression rest now upon his flesh like the gleaming of that old
ambrosial ointment of which Homer speaks as resting ever on the
persons of the gods, and cling to his clothing--the mitre binding his
perfumed yellow hair--the long tunic down to the white feet, somewhat
womanly, and the fawn-skin, with its rich spots, wrapped about the
shoulders. As the door opens to admit him, the scented air of the
vineyards (for the vine-blossom has an exquisite perfume) blows
through; while the convolvulus on his mystic rod represents all
wreathing flowery things whatever, with or without fruit, as in
America all such plants are still called vines. "Sweet upon the
mountains," the excitement of which he loves so deeply and to which
he constantly invites his followers--"sweet upon the mountains," and
profoundly amorous, his presence embodies all the voluptuous
abundance of Asia, its beating [63] sun, its "fair-towered cities,
full of inhabitants," which the chorus describe in their luscious
vocabulary, with the rich Eastern names--Lydia, Persia, Arabia Felix:
he is a sorcerer or an enchanter, the tyrant Pentheus thinks: the
springs of water, the flowing of honey and milk and wine, are his
miracles, wrought in person.
We shall see presently how, writing for that northern audience,
Euripides crosses the Theban with the gloomier Thracian legend, and
lets the darker stain show through. Yet, from the first, amid all
this floweriness, a touch or trace of that gloom is discernible. The
fawn-skin, composed now so daintily over the shoulders, may be worn
with the whole coat of the animal made up, the hoofs gilded and tied
together over the right shoulder, to leave the right arm disengaged
to strike, its head clothing the human head within, as Alexander, on
some of his coins, looks out from the elephant's scalp, and Hercules
out of the jaws of a lion, on the coins of Camarina. Those
diminutive golden horns attached to the forehead, represent not
fecundity merely, nor merely the crisp tossing of the waves of
streams, but horns of offence. And our fingers must beware of the
thyrsus, tossed about so wantonly by himself and his chorus. The
pine-cone at its top does but cover a spear-point; and the thing is a
weapon--the sharp spear of the hunter Zagreus--though hidden now by
the fresh leaves, and that button of pine-cone (useful also to dip in
[64] wine, to check the sweetness) which he has plucked down, coming
through the forest, at peace for a while this spring morning.
And the chorus emphasise this character, their songs weaving for the
whole piece, in words more effective than any painted scenery, a
certain congruous background which heightens all; the intimate sense
of mountains and mountain things being in this way maintained
throughout, and concentrated on the central figure. "He is sweet
among the mountains," they say, "when he drops down upon the plain,
out of his mystic musings"--and we may think we see the green
festoons of the vine dropping quickly, from foot-place to foot-place,
down the broken hill-side in spring, when like the Bacchanals, all
who can, wander out of the town to enjoy the earliest heats. "Let us
go out into the fields," we say; a strange madness seems to lurk
among the flowers, ready to lay hold on us also; autika ga pasa
choreusei+--soon the whole earth will dance and sing.
Dionysus is especially a woman's deity, and he comes from the east
conducted by a chorus of gracious Lydian women, his true sisters--
Bassarids, clad like himself in the long tunic, or bassara. They
move and speak to the music of clangorous metallic instruments,
cymbals and tambourines, relieved by the clearer notes of the pipe;
and there is a strange variety of almost imitative sounds for such
music, in their very [65] words. The Homeric hymn to Demeter
precedes the art of sculpture, but is rich in suggestions for it;
here, on the contrary, in the first chorus of the Bacchanals, as
elsewhere in the play, we feel that the poetry of Euripides is
probably borrowing something from art; that in these choruses, with
their repetitions and refrains, he is reproducing perhaps the spirit
of some sculptured relief which, like Luca della Robbia's celebrated
work for the organ-loft of the cathedral of Florence, worked by
various subtleties of line, not in the lips and eyes only, but in the
drapery and hands also, to a strange reality of impression of musical
effect on visible things.
They beat their drums before the palace; and then a humourous little
scene, a reflex of the old Dionysiac comedy--of that laughter which
was an essential element of the earliest worship of Dionysus--follows
the first chorus. The old blind prophet Teiresias, and the aged king
Cadmus, always secretly true to him, have agreed to celebrate the
Thiasus, and accept his divinity openly. The youthful god has
nowhere said decisively that he will have none but young men in his
sacred dance. But for that purpose they must put on the long tunic,
and that spotted skin which only rustics wear, and assume the thyrsus
and ivy-crown. Teiresias arrives and is seen knocking at the doors.
And then, just as in the medieval mystery, comes the [66] inevitable
grotesque, not unwelcome to our poet, who is wont in his plays,
perhaps not altogether consciously, to intensify by its relief both
the pity and the terror of his conceptions. At the summons of
Teiresias, Cadmus appears, already arrayed like him in the appointed
ornaments, in all their odd contrast with the infirmity and staidness
of old age. Even in old men's veins the spring leaps again, and they
are more than ready to begin dancing. But they are shy of the
untried dress, and one of them is blind--poi dei choreuein; poi
kathistanai poda; kai krata seisai polion;+ and then the difficulty
of the way! the long, steep journey to the glens! may pilgrims boil
their peas? might they proceed to the place in carriages? At last,
while the audience laugh more or less delicately at their aged
fumblings, in some co-operative manner, the eyes of the one combining
with the hands of the other, the pair are about to set forth.
Here Pentheus is seen approaching the palace in extreme haste. He
has been absent from home, and returning, has just heard of the state
of things at Thebes--the strange malady of the women, the dancings,
the arrival of the mysterious stranger: he finds all the women
departed from the town, and sees Cadmus and Teiresias in masque.
Like the exaggerated diabolical figures in some of the religious
plays and imageries of the Middle Age, he is an impersonation of
stupid impiety, one of those whom the gods willing to [67] destroy
first infatuate. Alternating between glib unwisdom and coarse
mockery, between violence and a pretence of moral austerity, he
understands only the sorriest motives; thinks the whole thing
feigned, and fancies the stranger, so effeminate, so attractive of
women with whom he remains day and night, but a poor sensual
creature, and the real motive of the Bacchic women the indulgence of
their lust; his ridiculous old grandfather he is ready to renounce,
and accuses Teiresias of having in view only some fresh source of
professional profit to himself in connexion with some new-fangled
oracle; his petty spite avenges itself on the prophet by an order to
root up the sacred chair, where he sits to watch the birds for
divination, and disturb the order of his sacred place; and even from
the moment of his entrance the mark of his doom seems already set
upon him, in an impotent trembling which others notice in him. Those
of the women who still loitered, he has already caused to be shut up
in the common prison; the others, with Ino, Autonoe, and his own
mother, Agave, he will hunt out of the glens; while the stranger is
threatened with various cruel forms of death. But Teiresias and
Cadmus stay to reason with him, and induce him to abide wisely with
them; the prophet fittingly becomes the interpreter of Dionysus, and
explains the true nature of the visitor; his divinity, the completion
or counterpart of that of Demeter; his gift of prophecy; [68] all the
soothing influences he brings with him; above all, his gift of the
medicine of sleep to weary mortals. But the reason of Pentheus is
already sickening, and the judicial madness gathering over it.
Teiresias and Cadmus can but "go pray." So again, not without the
laughter of the audience, supporting each other a little grotesquely
against a fall, they get away at last.
And then, again, as in those quaintly carved and coloured imageries
of the Middle Age--the martyrdom of the youthful Saint Firmin, for
instance, round the choir at Amiens--comes the full contrast, with a
quite medieval simplicity and directness, between the insolence of
the tyrant, now at last in sight of his prey, and the outraged beauty
of the youthful god, meek, surrounded by his enemies, like some fair
wild creature in the snare of the hunter. Dionysus has been taken
prisoner; he is led on to the stage, with his hands bound, but still
holding the thyrsus. Unresisting he had submitted himself to his
captors; his colour had not changed; with a smile he had bidden them
do their will, so that even they are touched with awe, and are almost
ready to admit his divinity. Marvellously white and red, he stands
there; and now, unwilling to be revealed to the unworthy, and
requiring a fitness in the receiver, he represents himself, in answer
to the inquiries of Pentheus, not as Dionysus, but simply as the
god's prophet, [69] in full trust in whom he desires to hear his
sentence. Then the long hair falls to the ground under the shears;
the mystic wand is torn from his hand, and he is led away to be tied
up, like some dangerous wild animal, in a dark place near the king's
stables.