Gilbert Norwood

“ Why is the omnipotent omniscient? May a man of free will and noble instincts escape a hereditary curse sanctioned by heaven? Such musings demand surely a quiet unhurried philosophic poem, not the decisive shock of drama. Æschylus devoted himself, nevertheless, not to literature in the fashion of Wordsworth, but to tragedy. How was he to write a play about Justice and Mercy, to discuss a compromise between the rigidity of safe government and the flexibility of wise government? Justice and Mercy are both essential to the moral universe, says the theologian—but they are incompatible. ”

“ He offends Heaven by his haughtiness, and is humbled; then, rather than accept his lesson, he shuns disgrace by suicide. This resolution is strong enough to overbear the appeals of Tecmessa and the silent sway of his little son; he faces death calmly and even thoughtfully. Grouped round the central figure are first Tecmessa and Teucer, and on a lower plane Odysseus, Menelaus, Agamemnon, and the chorus. Athena stands apart.
Tecmessa is one of the loveliest creations of Sophocles; there clings about her a silvery charm which is strangely refreshing amid the turbid grandeur of the play. ”

“ We are required to imagine it for ourselves—the intertwined amazement, joy, loathing, despair, which fill the woman’s heart during the few minutes for which she listens in silence to the king and the messenger. To have lost her child at birth, then after mourning his death for many years at length to find that he lives, that he stands before her, mature, strong, and kingly, but her own husband; then to realize that not now but long ago did she recover him, yet did not know him but loved him otherwise—this even Sophocles has not put into speech. ”

“ Hermione in Andromache and Creusa both go to all lengths in their passionate yearning for domestic happiness; one destroys her husband and her own future, the other reaps deeper bliss than she dared to hope. Iphigenia and Hippolytus serve the same goddess, but amid what different atmospheres and diverse destinies! This consciousness that effort brings about results different from its aims, that chance, whatever chance may be, is too potent to allow any faith in orthodox deities, only in moods of despair wrings from the poet such outcry as Hecuba’s, that Fate is “a capering idiot”. ”

“ For Æschylus the slaying of Clytæmnestra is a question of religion and ethics, for Sophocles it is a matter of psychology, the emotional history of Electra. He is content to take the religious facts for granted, and then to proceed with no misgivings to a purely human drama. The play begins amid the bright, cheerful surroundings of dawn and ends with happiness. When Orestes comes forth, his sword wet with his mother’s blood, he is entirely satisfied and untouched by any misgivings, simply because the question of matricide has been settled for him by Heaven. ”

“ As for the Dionysiac religion itself, the poet feels its vast emotional appeal—feels it so strongly that he has drawn the most wonderful picture of ecstatic religion to be found in literature; but if it is proposed to him as “a way of life” for civilized men he condemns it as firmly as unwillingly. To give free rein to passions and instincts hitherto unconscious or starved, this is a path, perhaps the only path, towards strangely [283] beautiful experience, the thrill of communion with non-human life; but it is not the path for man. ”

“ Life does not become ugly because full of sin or pain. It can only become ugly by growing unintelligible. So long as it can be understood, it remains to man, whose joys are all founded upon perception, a thing that can be loved; this is the one and sufficient reason why tragic drama is beautiful.
For the writer of the Hippolytus, then, life is something profoundly sorrowful yet profoundly dear. Hippolytus’ address to Artemis on his return from the chase is compact of that mystic loveliness which fills remote glades with a visible presentment of the beauty of holiness ”

“ This is the view which Sophocles accepts and expounds. Euripides who certainly did not accept it, here expounds it—in his own way and with deadly results. Many times Euripides questions the very existence of these deities, but now he sees fit to accept them for a moment, and depicts life as lived under such rulers. Men and women can feel and recreate the beauty of this world, but these gods time and again dash all into pitiful fragments. “The world is ruled by stupid fiends, who spend eternity thwarting one another. Do we dwell in a universe or a grinning chaos?” ”

“ On the Greek side, then, “the creatures of a day” are lost in the vision of eternal righteousness. But the poet has no such reason to obliterate the mighty names of Persia. Almost the whole effect of them is for us lost; but to an Athenian ear these barbaric polysyllables must have sounded with all the pomp of an ancient chivalry, the waves of the boundless and terrible Orient descending in deluge upon the tiny states of Hellas. ”

“ No less wonderful is the strictly dramatic economy of the play. The action is slight. Prometheus works no more; it is his part to endure. All the secondary characters act as a foil to bring the central figure into massive relief. Each has some touch of Prometheus: Hephæstus, pity without self-sacrifice; Cratos, strength without reflection; the Nymphs, tenderness without force; Oceanus, common-sense without dignity; Io, sensibility to suffering without the vision which learns the lesson of pain; Hermes, the power to serve without perception of the secret of sovereignty. ”

“ When finally the agony of her father, the empty clamour of Achilles, her mother’s undignified tremors, nerve her to trample her own dread under foot, we rejoice precisely because what we witness is the triumph of common human nature. Even Achilles, son of a goddess as story reported him, is a common-place person too. This is not the hero who flames through the Iliad, but a young noble led into the extreme of folly by this very legend that his origin is divine. ”

“ The greatest achievement of Sophocles was, however, reserved till the close of his life. The messenger’s speech, [410] narrating the last moments of Œdipus, is the culmination in Greek of whatever miracles human language can compass in exciting awe and delight. The poet has bent all his mastery of tense idiom, of varied and haunting rhythm, all his instinct for the pathos of life and the mystery of fate, to produce one mighty uplifting of the hearer into the region where emotion and intellect are no longer opposed but mingle into something for which we have no name but “Life”. ”

“ It must be remembered that a man became a “hero” not necessarily through any nobility or holiness of his life. It was rather the fact that he had passed through strange, unnatural experiences, had even committed morbid crimes, so long as those offences were purged by strange sufferings and death, violent, superhuman, or pitiable. Such was Œdipus, and such is Ajax. Greek feeling would have made a “hero” of Lear, of Hamlet, perhaps of Othello. Ajax is a man of essentially noble mould—this the speeches of Teucer express admirably—who sins deeply and suffers strangely. ”

“ Yet tragedy is found not only in the death of the body but in the death of ideals; and the destruction of Ion’s faith in his all-knowing unerring father is a fate from which, when we remember his happy carolling upon the dawn-lit temple-steps, we could wish to see him saved even by the Gorgon’s venom. Any out-cry wherewith he might have challenged Creusa’s is checked by the cold disgust which fills him at the sound of Athena’s bland periods ”

“ That is the moral of Jason and countless personages of Euripides: they are so detestable and yet so like ourselves. Jason indeed dupes himself as well as others. He really thinks he is kind and gentle, when he is only surrendering to an emotional atmosphere. His great weakness is the mere perfection of his own egotism; he has no power at all to realize another’s point of view. Throughout the play he simply refuses to believe that Medea feels his desertion as she asserts. ”

“ She is simply divine punishment roughly (but not casually) personified and given the name Athena. She gloats over the madman whom even the mortal standing beside her pities, and the only lesson she draws for him is that men must shun pride. It is natural, but useless, to call her a fiend; she serves merely as the visible and audible symbol that Heaven punishes haughty independence of spirit. That instead of mere evolutions of puppets we have a striking drama is due simply to the fact that Sophocles is interested far more in Ajax than in the goddess. ”

“ Two aspects of this play are unmistakable and apparently incompatible. The plot closely resembles that of the Iphigenia in Tauris; the style and manner of treatment are curiously light. What can have been Euripides’ purpose in repeating, after so short an interval, a copy of that grim masterpiece, and to execute it in this light-hearted fashion? The Helen is in no possible sense a tragedy. At the point where the audience should be spell-bound by suspense and dread—the cajoling of the king—we are relieved from all oppression by the facility with which the captives succeed. ”

“ In the art of iambic verse Sophocles stands beyond all other Greeks unrivalled. Beside him Æschylus sounds almost clumsy, Euripides glib, Aristophanes vulgar. Only Shakespeare has that complete mastery over every shade of emphasis, every possibility of grandeur and simple ease alike. The iambic line in Sophocles’ hands can at will display a haunting romantic loveliness, the profoundest dignity, the sharpest edges of emotion, or the quiet prose of every day. ”

“ The “human interest” is almost confined to the gods, without our forgetting that they are surrounded by human auditors. Athena and the Furies are made to live by a few noble sweeping strokes; Athena, the majestic presentment of Olympian wisdom and the visible head of her favoured city; the Furies majestic in their rage, unanswerable in their claim that punishment of crime cannot be done away if the world is to endure. Apollo is a curious study, less sublime than we expected. ”

“ Antoine, an expression in un-attic vehemence and elaboration of that passionate sympathy with all existence which blazes in the lyrics of the Bacchæ—a yearning which Arnold in the Scholar-Gipsy has uttered in milder and still more haunting language.
There is no final synthesis of Euripides. Throughout his life he held true to those two principles, the worship of beauty, and loyalty to the dry light of intelligence. Glamour never blinded him to sin and folly; misery and coarse tyranny never taught his lips to forswear the glory of existence. ”

“ Salamis was fought and won just as he had left childhood behind. His adolescence and maturity coincided with the rise and establishment of the Athenian Empire; he listened to Pericles, saw the Parthenon and Propylæa rise upon the Acropolis, associated with Æschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Thucydides, watched the work of Phidias and Polygnotus grow to life under their fingers. Though he carried into the years of Nestor the genius of Shakespeare, he was yet so blessed that he died before the fall of Athens. ”

“ Nothing in Greek tragedy is more common than for a person after learning frightful news to rush within the doors in despair. But he does not return; a messenger tells the news of his fate. In this play news is indeed brought of the bloody deeds that have befallen. Then comes a sight almost too appalling for art: the doors open and the man of doom staggers into the light of day once more. Spiritually he is dead, but he may not destroy himself since he cannot go down to Hades where his father and mother dwell. He must live, surviving himself, as it were a corpse walking the upper earth. ”

“ Why should Phædra strive against her instincts? Even the gods have erred through love; she will cure her mistress. The remedy, she soon hints, is nothing but surrender. At this Phædra is so indignant that the other again takes refuge in ambiguity; she retires to fetch certain charms. The ode which follows proclaims the irresistible sway of love. The queen, in the meantime, has been standing near the palace-door [206] and now recoils in horror—she has heard Hippolytus reviling the nurse; nothing, she cries, is now left to her but speedy death. Hippolytus enters in fury, followed by the nurse. ”

“ Heracles believes in one God utterly above human weaknesses. Then what of Zeus’ love of Alcmena, the jealousy of Hera, the whole basis of his suffering as conceived by the orthodox? And what of his own semi-divine nature, the foundation again of his superhuman deeds? They are delusions. Heracles is no demi-god; his exploits, however great and valuable, are in no sense miraculous. This view, moreover, is precisely that which we ought to gain from the early part of the drama. ”

“ Interesting to the historian as the only extant tragedy dealing with a contemporary subject, the Persæ also wins the highest admiration as a piece of literature not unworthy of its theme. The muscular [88] and majestic diction of the speeches, the noble sweep of the lyrics, the colossal dignity of the characters, the picturesqueness and vigour which make the story of Salamis one of the greatest passages even in Æschylus—these are characteristics of the poet which the Supplices presents only in germ. ”

“ The sordid side of her vengeance, her amour with Ægisthus, remains hardly hinted at until the very end, where it springs into overwhelming prominence—but at the very moment when we are preparing to pass over to the Choephorœ, the second great stage of the action, in which the mission of Orestes is to be exalted. Clytæmnestra has been often compared to Lady Macbeth. But Shakespeare’s creation is more feminine than that of the Athenian. She evinces inhuman heartlessness and cynicism till the task is accomplished; before the play ends she is broken for ever. ”

“ So sincere a thinker as Euripides was certain sooner or later to attack himself, at any rate to examine his position and methods with humorous detachment. So far we may, we must, go with Verrall; the elaborate and delightfully detailed development we can hardly accept—the evidence is not sufficiently strong.
But the poet is making fun not only of himself. The false Helen and her disappearance at a crisis in the action, are not merely miracles of a type in which he utterly disbelieves; they are features which even a believer would remove as far as possible into the background. ”

“ She has strong claims on our pity and sympathy, but fails to win them. Her mother is a ready victim of any emotion which breathes upon her; Electra has settled her position emotionally, intellectually, morally, years ago. Nothing can alter her; she is the victim and the apostle of an idée fixe. The crimes of love are no less frightful than the crimes of hate; in Electra affection for Agamemnon has become the basis of cold ferocity against Clytæmnestra. It is Orestes who shrinks when the deed is to be done, Electra who braces his resolution. She has borne no child. ”

“ The principle upheld by Antigone, and that upheld by Creon, are prima facie of equal validity. The poet may, possibly, agree with Antigone rather than with the king, but the current belief, that the princess is splendidly right and her oppressor ignobly wrong, stultifies the play; it would become not tragedy but crude melodrama. In judging Attic literature there is nothing which it is more vital to remember than the immense importance attached by Athenians to the State and its claims. We are alive to the sanctity of human life, but think far less of the sanctity of national life. ”

“ Just as we are severed by a wide gulf from the crude but not ignoble certainty, the superficial worship of progress which marked the Victorian era, so was Euripides severed from the “men of Marathon” for whom Æschylus wrote.
So it is that we can judge the poet of “the Greek enlightenment” [856] —or rather of the Athenian disillusionment—better than most generations of his readers. To aid us, there have naturally arisen writers to voice, in a manner often like his, our own disappointment and our renewed interest in parts of life and the world which we had ignored as unmeaning or barren. ”