Amelia Gere Mason

“ With sad dignity she crowns with myrtle the altar at which she prays, but not until she takes leave of the familiar room so conse­crated by love and happiness do the tears begin to fall. This tender wife, who freely gives her life to save her husband, does not falter as she passion ately embraces her weeping children, and bids a kind farewell to her pitying servants. The only thing she asks for herself is to see the sun once more, and she tries to inspire this selfish, posing, half-hearted husband with her own fortitude, as her spirit " glides on light wing down the silent paths of sleep." ”

“ Strong men, among whom are her father and Achilles, the heroes of the ancient world, stand calmly by and let her die. The powerful lover, who will give his life later to avenge the death of his friend, is sorry to lose so sweet a flower for his wife, but he makes no real effort to save her. When she is told that the gods have decreed her sacrifice for the good of her country, the cry of nature is silenced, the touching appeal is stilled. ”

“ Many of them hold places of honor and power. These women of a primitive age, who stand at the portals of the young world luminous and smiling, or draped in the stately dignity of antique goddesses, still retain the distinction of classic ideals. They look out from the misty dawn of things with veiled faces, but we know that love shone from their soft eyes, and words of wisdom fell from their rosy lips. ”

“ Cordelia, true and loyal as she is, and tender at heart, does not approach her in strength and dignity. But the duty of the Greek heroine does not end with her father's death. She lays down her life at last that the false-hearted brother, who has given her no gentle consideration in her days of helplessness and despair, may not lie unburied on the plains of Thebes, and so wander without rest in Hades. She laments the lost pleasures of living. No husband or children are to be hers. ”

“ But the dramatists reflected in a thousand ways the altered spirit of an age in which good women had no visible part. Their immortal heroines are equally strong and instinct with vitality, though less simple and of severer mold, but they are revered from afar as the goddesses were, while real women are a target for abuse and ridicule. It is to no rare and perishable beauty, no fleeting grace, no intellectual brilliancy, that they owe their eternal charm, but to their moral greatness, their strength of sacrifice. ”

“ There is no fairer thing Than when the lord and lady with one soul One home possess. This was the poet's domestic ideal, and the ages have not brought a better one, though they have brought us many things to make it more beautiful. But what shall we say of Helen, the alluring child of fancy and romance, who stands as an eternal type of the beauty that led captive the Hellenic world ? ”

“ Perhaps Antigone is a trifle too coldly perfect, too faultlessly wise — a tacit reflection upon every- day human nature, that likes its ease, and counts the cost of its renunciations. We look for a trace of weakness, a warm burst of living tenderness. But duty is shy like love, and chary of expression. " I do not love a friend who loves in words," is the cry of her steadfast soul. ”

“ Beneath the glad paeans of heroes we hear at intervals, across the ages, the clear voices of women chanting a miserere in an undertone of sorrow or despair. Doubtless the poets saw and felt the tragical side of their lives, but tradition had the inevitability of fate, as it has had in other times. They have given us great and lonely ideals of womanhood, but a somber picture of the place held by living women in the Athenian world. ”

“ These exalted ideals, so bravely tender, so patiently enduring, were the victims of adverse des­tiny or of their own devotion. But the world held for them no reward in the masculine heart. There were many women in classic story who died for men, but only one for whom men were willing to die, and this was Helen, whose divine beauty appealed to the senses and the imagination. ”

“ Dire is the violence of ocean waves, And dire the blast of rivers and hot fires, And dire is want and dire are countless things, But nothing is so dire and dread as woman. No painting could express her dreadfulness. ”

“ To reconcile such an attitude with the strong character of many of the women portrayed is not easy, unless we take them as object-lessons to their sex in the honor and glory of self-sacrifice.
In the glamour the poets have cast about their great creations, and the marvelous power with which they have made these women live for us, we are apt to lose sight of the fact that the moral force of the best of them is centered in the superhuman immolation of themselves for the benefit of men, to whom it never occurs that any consideration whatever is due to these innocent sufferers. ”

“ The drama reflects the dominant sentiments of the time, if not always those of the author, and the frequency of such ungracious, not to say virulent, attacks proves the complaisance of a Greek audience and the absence of all consideration for women. Even Aristophanes takes Euripides to task for being a woman-hater, and turns upon him the sharpest points of his satire ; but he has himself added the last touch of abuse, which only misses its aim for modern ears by its incredible coarseness. He gives to women all of the lowest vices, without a redeeming virtue. ”

“ But the dignity of the princess asserts itself with the forethought and sympathy of the woman in the discreet words with which she greets the destitute stranger, and modestly directs him to her royal mother. Her swift eye notes his air of distinction, his courteous address, and she naively wishes in her heart that the gods would send her such a husband. It is to Arête that she bids him go, to the beloved queen who shares the throne of Alcinous with " honors never before given to a woman." ”

“ It is difficult to comprehend the attitude of the dramatists of the golden age toward women. They have left many fine and powerful types ; they have created heroines of singular moral grandeur and a superb quality of courage that led them to face death or the bitterest fate as serenely as if they were composing themselves to pleasant dreams ; but there was no insult or injustice too great to be heaped upon their sex. ”

“ Even this fair-haired daughter of the gods, who set nations at variance, and did so many things not to be commended, gathers a subtle charm from the domestic setting which the poet's art has given her. She sits serenely in the midst of the woes she has brought, teaching her maidens to work after strange patterns, and weaving her own tragic story in the golden web. ”

“ It does not occur to her that she is very wicked ; indeed, she thinks regretfully that, after all, she is worthy of a braver man. The tears that fall do not dim her brightness. Gray-haired men go to their death under the spell of her divine loveliness, but forget to chide. She is the helpless victim of Aphrodite, who is indulgently charged with all her frailties. Twice ten years have gone since she sailed away from Sparta, but when her forgiving husband takes her home she has lost none of that mystic beauty which is " never stale and never old." ”

“ The Helen who lives and breathes for us is the Helen of Homer, fair and sweet, more sinned against than sinning, pitying the sorrows she cannot cure, but saved by her matchless charm from the chilling frost of mortal censure. ”

“ These are the great Homeric types, women of simple and noble outlines, untouched by the fires of passion, wise, loyal, efficient, and brave, but rich in sympathy and all sweet affections. The central figures of the fireside, with needle and distaff in hand, they were not without a fine intelligence which, after the fashion of primitive times, found its field in the every-day problems of life. ”

“ Yet it is in the minds of men that these women were conceived, and it is impossible to suppose that they had not at least some faint counterpart in real life, though possibly men, and women as well, are apt to make ideals of what they think ought to be rather than of what is. But why did the Greek poets cast such ridicule and dishonor upon the sex which they have shown capable of such supreme devotion and such exalted virtues? ”

“ It is appalling, the stern and pitiless passion with which her untamed spirit, spurred on by the white-hot hate which is often a great love reversed, tramples upon every human impulse, and sweeps a whole race with her to destruction. ”

“ A dead wife is the best goods in a man's house." Under such teaching it is not at all surprising that the Jews began their morning invocations, two thousand years ago, with these significant words : " Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast not made me a heathen, who hast not made me a slave, who hast not made me a woman." ”

“ Men indoors sit weaving at the loom, And wives outdoors must earn their daily bread,
has its unpleasant side. How it was regarded by women does not appear, but if they found a paradise they were speedily driven out of it. Evidently men did not find the exchange of occupations agreeable. Two or three centuries before our era, a Greek ruler came to the throne, who had other views, and every woman awoke one morning to the fact that her day was ended, her power was gone, and that she owned nothing at all. ”

“ The esthetic Greeks surpassed the Jews in their denunciations, and exhausted their wit in cynical phrases that lacked even the dignity of criticism. No writers have abused women more persistently. It is an evidence of great moral vitality that, in the face of such undisguised contempt, they were able to maintain any prestige at all. If we may credit the poets who gave the realistic side of things, there was neither honor nor joy in the life of the average woman who dwelt in the shadow of Helicon. ”

“ The vulgar of my sex I most exceed In real power, when most humane my deed, says the gentle Penelope, as, tear-dimmed and constant, she weaves and unweaves the many-colored threads, and waits for her royal lord, who basks in the smiles of Calypso over the sea, and forgets her until he tires of the fascinating siren and begins to long for his home. If there was a trace of artfulness in the innocent device of the faithful wife, it was all the weapon she had to save her honor. ”

“ One cannot help wondering if she never had a misgiving that the man who could ask his wife to comfort him for his unspeakable misery in letting her die for him was not worth dying for. But the Greek women had been long trained in the school of passive suffering, and it never seemed to occur to them that it was not quite in the nature of things for the weaker half of the human family to have a monopoly of the sacrifices. ”

“ Let not women counsel," is the advice of men to the wisest of them,
Woman, know That silence is a woman's noblest part, says the ill-tempered Ajax to his amiable wife. This gentle Tecmessa wishes to die with him, for "Why should I wish to live if you are dead?" He only tells her to mind her own affairs and be silent. ”

“ More than a thousand women is one man Worthy to see the light of life, says the young Iphigenia, as she folds her saffron veil about her, and goes to her doom with words of love and forgiveness, praying for the cruel masters she dies to save. ”

“ But these monsters of crime are few, and seem to throw into stronger relief the self-forgetful women who exalt their inferior position, and bend their heads to the yoke with such stately dignity that they seem to command even in obeying. ”

“ The saddest feature of it is that men abused them for the ignorance and frivolity which they had themselves practically compelled. The dramatists lived and wrote in an age when men had reached a higher plane of knowledge from which orthodox women were rigidly excluded. The natural consequence of this exclusion was a total lack of companionship, which sent the Attic woman into a species of slavery, while her husband found his society in a class that was better educated and more interesting, but less respectable. ”

“ No kindly tear is shed. There are a few women of colossal wickedness who serve as foils, or shadows in the picture. Their very sins are a part of the overmastering strength that defies its hard imitations. ”

“ Of all things, as many as have life and intellect, we women are the most wretched race ; we must first purchase a husband with excess of money, then receive him as our lord," is the bitter protest of the wronged Medea, and the key-note to her tragical destiny. Clytemnestra says that she has always been trained to obey, but she towers far above her warrior husband in force as in crime. She resents his unfaithfulness; she does not forgive him for the inhuman sacrifice of their innocent daughter ”

“ But, in spite of rational theories, the world's heart still thrills to a generous emotion so overpowering as to drown all consideration of self, whether or not it is faulty in its mundane wisdom or its arithmetic. ”