John Pentland Mahaffy

“ But in the next generation, when poetic genius had died away, actors became of importance, people began to frequent the theatre, not to see a great play, but a great actor, and then it was that the Medea sprang at once from the third to the first place as an acting piece. For one actor was sufficient to bring out all the power of the play, and nowhere could a great actor find a more grateful subject for his genius than the impersonation of the vehement character and furious passion of the great Colchian princess. ”

“ There are, in the extant tragedies, only two really disagreeable women—Medea and Hermione (in the Andromache) —for the savage feelings of revenge in Alcmene (Heracleidæ) and in Hecuba are, so to speak, extorted from them by dreadful trials, and the injustice of fate. But Medea is no Greek, she is a foreigner from a wild and gloomy race, who is moreover deeply wronged in her ungovernable but therefore strong affections. She may be a human tigress, but she is a tigress with a mother's heart, and all her violence does not destroy our sympathy with her afflictions. ”

“ But no sooner has he appeared as their saviour, than a heaven-sent madness makes him their murderer, and his situation becomes more deeply tragic than that of Sophocles' Ajax. For the outburst of Ajax only brought him disgrace; Heracles is so crushed that there is no place for the display of iron resolve. He is discovered asleep, and fast bound, with his wretched father and the chorus watching him—a kindred scene to the watching of Electra over Orestes. ”

“ The peasant princess surprised with her pitcher upon her shoulder, the heedless hospitality of the honest great-hearted peasant, the anxiety of the housewife about supplying the sudden and noble visitors, the hurried borrowing of provisions from a good neighbour—here are scenes which may shock a Voltaire or a Schlegel, but which impress an English critic with a sense of the power and the love of human nature shown in our best tragedies. ”

“ Before such an audience what chance could a half-way politician have of success—a man who offended both sides by exposing their weaknesses, who perhaps offended them still more because he puzzled them by advocating portions of their policy with extraordinary force and clearness? So the great outsider would be cheered by opposite sides of the house, but make enemies everywhere, for never was party spirit more violent and uncompromising than among the people who thought, as Thucydides says, τὸ πρὸς ἅπαν συνετὸν, ἐπὶ πᾶν ἀργόν—to be clever at everything was to be good for nothing—in politics. ”

“ There is therefore a propriety in speaking of dramas of plot as a separate class of Greek tragedies, which might seem unmeaning to those only acquainted with modern literature.
The other two divisions are dramas of character and dramas of situation. In the former, the human will asserts itself against the power of destiny, and even when crushed in the conflict, asserts its inalienable dignity and liberty. This is the highest and the most essential kind of Greek tragedy, and one in which Æschylus and Sophocles were never equalled except by Shakspere in his greatest character plays. ”

“ The Tauric Iphigenia is a very beautiful conception of a Greek maiden in exile, compelled by the gloomy rites of Artemis, whose priestess she is, to sacrifice all Greeks that are cast upon the coast—a service which she performs with reluctance and with deep compassion, not without sceptical questioning concerning the morality of her office, or the interpretation of the real demands of the goddess. Her longing for her home and country gives her a special interest in every hapless Greek victim ”

“ Far more effective are his lay figures of a very different kind—his children, who with their cry of pain, or still more, with their unconscious silence, enlist the spectator's profoundest sympathy for the helpless sorrows of a helpless age. Such are Eumelus the child of Alcestis, the children of the fallen Thebans in the Supplices, the children of Medea, and, above all, the little Orestes in the Iphigenia, who is brought in a mute and unwitting suppliant for the life of his sister. ”

“ But she never ceases to love life; unlike the slave Polyxena, or the exile Macaria, she has everything to lose, and hence she cannot go to her death, as they do, with calm resolve, but with that burning excitement which has sustained the most sensitive, and therefore the greatest martyrs. When Sophocles has given the same feature, this wild excitement at the approach of death, to his stronger and more masculine Antigone, he has not, I think, been so consistent in his drawing of character. ”

“ Nothing is more disappointing to the student of the literature of Greece than the obscurity which clouds the life of almost all her greatest authors. Except in those few cases where our Greek books imply an autobiography by their very contents, such as the fragments of Solon, the Anabasis of Xenophon, or the speeches of Demosthenes, we are thrown back upon notices exceedingly scanty and exceedingly untrustworthy. ”

“ Thus the dignity of a great nature asserts itself against the utmost which a spiteful Providence can do to break it down, and the resigned departure of the hero for Athens is a greater victory over the enmity of Juno, than all the successes of his twelve Labours. ”

“ She debates, in an aside not common on the Greek stage, whether she will appeal to Agamemnon, who is present, to aid her in her vengeance, and she ultimately does so with great art, if not with dignity. She then carries out her plot of slaying the Thracian king's children, and putting out his eyes, with great fierceness. The wild lamentations of the barbarian, Agamemnon's cool refusal to support him, and his gloomy prophecies, conclude the play. The change in Hecuba, when there is nothing more to plead for, from despair to savage fury, is finely conceived. ”

“ These men brought their arts from clumsiness of proportion, from the stereotyped curls and smile, into the simplicity and majesty which we may worship, not only at Athens, but in the ruins of Bassæ, or in the wondrous pediment of Alkamenes, lately drawn from oblivion under the sands of Olympia. A great enthusiasm for art seized on the public mind at Athens. Men of after days knew not whether to wonder most at the feverish hurry or the eternal solidity with which these great monuments were built. ”

“ Phædra is therefore in no sense an abandoned woman, or a low character ceding to her ordinary passions, as a modern reader might at first sight suppose, but a noble and pure woman afflicted with a horrible madness, over which she in vain strives to obtain control. What is, however, though equally Greek, not so reconcilable with our ideas of a noble nature, is her dying vengeance by bequeathing to her husband a false accusation against Hippolytus. ”

“ We moderns use for a melody, which contains several musical phrases of various length and accent, the simple rhymes of our poetry, though they seldom embrace more than pairs of lines, which we expand and vary by repetitions. The Greek lyric poet made his poetical strophe to correspond with the whole melody, and thus introduced that more intricate system of long and short lines, and of various metres, which is so puzzling to the modern student. The early Greek poets seldom used refrains—the easiest way of accentuating rhythm. ”

“ Many of the slaves, on the contrary, are noble and cultivated beyond the fashion of the older tragedy, and there are few finer touches than the outburst of joy in the old retainer of Menelaus, when he finds that the real Helen had not fled from her home or disgraced her royal name and race. ”

“ The Tauric Iphigenia.—Iphigenia, priestess of Artemis among the Tauri, opens the play with a prologue, announcing her miraculous escape from the sacrifice at Aulis, and her grim duty of consecrating for sacrifice the Greek strangers who land on the coast. She then goes out to seek the attendants she had summoned to join the funeral libations for her brother Orestes. For she feels convinced of his death by a vivid dream of her shattered home, and a single pillar standing, endowed with human voice. ”

“ Every Greek poet (I might indeed say every poet) is strictly the child of his day, the exponent of a national want, the preacher of a national aspiration, at once the outcome and the leader of a literary public, or at least of a public which craves after spiritual sustenance. From Homer to Menander this feature marks social life in Greece, and makes the history of Greek literature pre-eminently the history of the Hellenic people. ”

“ He was indeed no public man, but a confirmed student, a lover of books and of solitude; but yet certainly the personal friend of Pericles and Socrates, his elder and younger contemporaries, the hearer of Anaxagoras|Anaxagoras and Prodicus; if not the active promoter, at least the close observer of all that was great and brilliant in Athens, then the Hellas of Hellas, the inmost and purest shrine of all the national culture. We will therefore introduce the poet by a short survey of the society in which he lived, and the conditions under which he pursued his art. ”

“ Even the Athenian public seem to have forgotten that a dramatic poet must speak in character. Thus Plutarch tells us about the Ixion, that the audience cried out against a passage in which wealth was praised above virtue, and that the piece would have been hissed down had not the poet rushed on the scene and bid them have patience to see the punishment consequent on such principles. Whether the story be true or false of the Attic audience, it is certainly applicable to the narrow and stupid criticisms of later writers. ”

“ Thus the use of lay figures of gods—any character they do exhibit is spiteful and vindictive—seems an unfortunate concession of the poet to his age, and one which obscures the deep moral faith he feels in the ultimate supremacy of justice. ”

“ There was, of course, a general increase of intelligence, of knowledge about the outlying parts of the Greek world, of intercourse with men from foreign cities, particularly, moreover, of talking power, transferred from public debate to private conversation; all these advances were indisputable. But it is not so clear that the social intercourse did not become too serious a mental exercise, especially when the country life of the old Attic gentry decayed, and Athens began to absorb all the life and intellect of the people. ”

“ Here again there is interest in the plot throughout, and in every respect higher interest than in the analogous Helena. The recognition scene, so gradual and yet exciting, is finer than the beautiful recognition of Menelaus and Helen. The escape of the fugitives is less triumphant, and their knavery less successful. Above all, the more than fraternal affection of Orestes and Pylades adds a new interest to the story, and makes it one of the most suggestive of plays. ”

“ When we come to the more developed character plays of Sophocles the chorus necessarily becomes a spectator, but a deeply interested and sympathetic spectator, singing, moreover, those hymns to the gods—dirges, or pæans, which come within the action of the piece, and require choral music and solemn dancing for their performance. Thus every early Greek dramatist was of necessity also a lyric poet, and a lyric poet in a far more prominent sense than are our dramatists, who insert here and there an occasional song. ”

“ The later Latin tragedies, handed down to us under the name of Seneca, show the same respect for Euripides as a tragic model, but the false taste of an artificial age adorned his purity with showy tinsel, and exaggerated his pathos with extravagant bombast. One great scene (in the Latin Troades) , which we cannot identify, leaves us in doubt whether the Roman has followed some forgotten Greek model or struck out one fresh spark of genius amid the lurid glow of his diseased taste. ”

“ The work of popularising the theories of the philosophers, and of working out the formal side of knowledge, was taken up by a class of men who, though claiming to be philosophers, were very different from the solitary thinkers just named—I mean the much-decried much-vindicated sophists. The leaders of these—Gorgias, Protagoras, and Prodicus—are represented, even by the bitter enemies of their class, as both able and respectable, undertaking the task of general higher education, and fulfilling through the Greek cities exactly the office of the universities in England. ”

“ When we pass from these first-rate personages to consider his lesser creations, we find a certain poverty which surprises us. Most of them are, in fact, suffering women; who, though they are always intellectually strong and able to argue their case against their opponents, affect us rather by their circumstances than their character. Such are his Andromache (both in the Andromache and the Troades) and his Hecuba, though her savagery—like that of Alcmena at the end of the Heracleidæ—adds an unpleasant trait, which Euripides seems to have found common enough in the old Greek women of his time. ”

“ This is no innovation by our poet. The parallel portrait by Sophocles is not different. Her querulous irony, and downright exposure of Clytemnestra's vices, when that queen is decoyed into a visit to her humble home, her ostentation of poverty and disgrace as a protest against her mother—are not inconsistent with the unrelenting hardness which keeps the troubled and wavering Orestes to his purpose, and insists upon the murder, though she is not free from terror when the deed is done. ”

“ Thus the political education which is obtained by the public discussion of constitutional questions, and by that alone, was certainly one of the leading attributes of Athenian society as Euripides grew up. We endeavour nowadays to attain this diffusion of political sense by a public press; but I need hardly remind anyone who has even once joined in a formal debate on any such question, how infinitely better man is educated by one debate than by a thousand leading articles or reports. ”

“ Theology and metaphysic always precede ethics and sociology as sciences. Early thinkers assume the nature of man as obvious, and desire to probe the secrets of the universe. Thus we have in Greece, beginning earlier than the Periclean epoch, a series of great names in the history of philosophy—Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras—whose speculations on Being and Becoming, on Permanence and Change, on the elements of matter and the laws of their composition, have afforded even to modern German metaphysicians all the best hints for their systems. ”

“ But we can find no parallel to the splendid education of the stage, which all the adult population derived from the growing and now paramount tragedy. All the deepest questions of religion and of morals were brought home to men's minds in a manner infinitely more striking than the best and ablest preaching in our Christian pulpits. ”

“ He saw that any literal translation of Greek plays was totally out of the question on the modern stage, and that they must be re-written. Nevertheless he remarks, as Racine had done, that in the new versions, those parts had always been the most effective which were borrowed directly from the originals. This led him to censure severely the love-intrigues introduced in the French tragedies, which he described as "une coquetterie continuelle," "pour complaire au goût le plus fade et le plus faux qui ait jamais corrompu la littérature." ”

“ Moreover the vengeance of the goddess, who is drawn in the most repulsive colours, seems to express the retaliation of nature upon those who violate her decrees, for asceticism was not honoured by the Greeks, who even in their tragedies are never weary of recommending a moderate share in the delights of love. But in addition to this larger conception, the spite of Aphrodite, as well as the weakness of Artemis, who is the hero's patron goddess, does seem intended by the poet to lower the respect for these deities in the public mind. ”

“ He is, indeed, rich in feeble querulous heroes, apart from the ragged heroes of suffering, whom Aristophanes derides. The Agamemnon of his Iphigenia is a palmary instance. All through the play he is drifting hither and thither, inventing paltry subterfuges, playing the king without policy or firmness, an object of contempt and of pity to his stronger subjects. All this is exceedingly dramatic, but only suited to a secondary character. Very similar is the drawing of Admetus, the hospitable but selfish and weak husband of Alcestis. ”

“ It is therefore but fair to observe, in conclusion, that quite apart from the injustice of comparing anyone else with so unique a genius as Shakspere, there are distinct reasons why the characters of Euripides, even were they equally well drawn, should not appear to us so various or life-like. For we do not always remember when reading Greek tragedies, that they are interpreted to us either by Greek scholiasts, the most hopelessly undramatic of men, or by modern professors, who are hardly better judges of the stage. ”

“ Creusa indeed attempts a horrible and treacherous crime, thus exhibiting the latent fury which Euripides so often finds in the recesses of the female heart. But we may well excuse or palliate her offence, when we consider how her long-deferred hopes, now at the moment of expected fulfilment, are dashed to the ground, and her whole moral balance is destroyed by this crowning injustice of the god to whom she had appealed. Both heroines are only heroines of suffering, but they have nevertheless a charm which none but a great artist can convey. ”

“ The heroes of Euripides are by no means so prominent or so interesting as his heroines. While he has succeeded, among the latter, in creating immortal types, there is hardly a single hero in his extant plays of whom so much could be asserted. In Ion and in Hippolytus we have indeed charming pictures of youthful freshness and innocence, not without a certain preoccupation which seems like callousness, and shows a want of sympathy with the passions of manhood. ”

“ When he produced his first play, Æschylus was just dead, and though Sophocles was in the zenith of his fame, and the delight of all Athens, men must have looked anxiously for the appearance of a new poet, who would succeed to the place left vacant by the veteran dramatist. To such Euripides must have been indeed disappointing. His last plays came out about the time of Sophocles' death, when men despaired of seeing any worthy heir of either in tragedy, for the younger generation had tried in vain to rival these poets even in their old age, as Aristophanes plainly informs us. ”