Chapter IV · THE WORKS OF SOPHOCLES (continued 2)

The dull repetition of πρὸς τοῦτο and of ἄν; the extremely slow movement of the penultimate line with its three spondees and the word-ending at the close of the second foot; above all, the manner in which the whole dragging sentence leads up to the monosyllable ἄν, so rare at the end of a sentence, and there stops dead, is a marvellous suggestion of the lame man’s painful progress and of the way in which at the end of his endurance he falls prone and spent upon the object of his endeavour.

Specially striking phrases are not common. Sophocles obtains his effect not by brilliant strokes of diction, but by the cumulative effect of a sustained manner. There are such dexterities of course, like Antigone’s πόθος τοι καὶ κακῶν ἄρ’ ἦν τις,[405] and the cry of Electra to her brother’s ashes:—[406]

A poet who can, by that infinitesimal change from τὸν μηδέν to τὸ μηδέν, indicate the very soul of grief, may claim to be one of the immortal masters of language.

Modern readers find one great fault in this poet—colourlessness, coldness, an absence of hearty verve; he seems a little too polished and restrained. The truth is that in Sophocles the Attic spirit finds its literary culmination. Æschylus lives in the pre-Periclean world; Euripides is too restless and cosmopolitan to reflect the spirit of one nation only; Plato and Demosthenes belong to the age of disillusionment which came after Ægospotami; and Thucydides, though he shows many Attic qualities, is without limpidity. Anyone, then, who would understand the Athenian genius as embodied in letters must read Sophocles. He will find the most useful commentary in the Parthenon and its friezes, and in the remains of Greek statuary. One of the most marvellous and precious experiences in life is to gaze upon works like the so-called Fates in the British Museum, the Venus of Melos, or the Ludovisi Hera. Many a casual visitor has glanced for the first time at these works and known strong disappointment. A mere piece of marble accurately worked into a female face or figure; majestic to be sure—but is this all? If he will look again he at last perceives that the stone has put on, not merely humanity, but immortality. An invisible glow radiates from it like the odour from a flower. We have never found any name for it but Beauty. It is indeed the quintessence of loveliness, delicate as gossamer yet indestructible as granite. So with the tragedies of Sophocles: it is possible to read the Œdipus Tyrannus in certain moods and find it mere frigid elegance. But, as with the beauties of Nature, so with the glories of art, it is the second glance, the lingering of the eye beyond the careless moment, that surprises something of the ultimate secret.

For reticence is one of the notes of Athenian art. No writer ever effected so much with so scanty materials as Sophocles; he carries the art of masterly omission to its extreme. Shakespeare attempts to express everything; the mere exuberance of his phraseology is as wonderful as anything else in his work. But even King Lear or Hamlet, being written by a man, share the weakness of humanity and leave the foundation of life undisclosed. Such a disability may daunt the scientist; it is the salvation of the artist; for the effect of all art rests on co-operation between the maker and the spectator of the work. In literature, then, the author knows that he must omit, and the reader or hearer must supply for himself the contributions of his own heart and experience. How much then is he to omit? On the varying answers to that question rest the different forms of literature and the divergent schools of each form. Sophocles has left more to his hearer than any other writer in the world. Another note of Athenian art is simplicity. It is not crudeness, nor naïveté, nor baldness of style. In a thousand passages of Sophocles, Thucydides, and Plato, the line between savourless banality and the words they have written is fine indeed, but that little means a whole world of art. Many a fine author—Marlowe is a conspicuous example—writes nobly because he writes violently, or with a conscious effort to soar. But let him once trip, and he sprawls in bombast or nerveless garrulity. Simplicity without baldness is the most difficult of all literary excellences, and is yet achieved everywhere by Sophocles except when he rises to a different level, of which we shall speak later.

Such then is the cause of Sophoclean frigidity and lack of colour. He is led to write so by his Attic frugality and economy of effect, by his knowledge that his audience can follow him into his rarefied atmosphere, and by another cause. In our own time men have looked to art for a “message” from more exciting or more lovely spheres. We talk of “the literature of escape”; for us art must be an expanding influence. The Athenian sought in it a concentrating influence. Each citizen who witnessed the Antigone was a member of a sovereign assembly; he understood foreign policy at first hand; war or peace depended upon his voice. Many came to watch the Ajax who had but a while ago fought at Œnophyta or in Egypt. Such men did not need “local colour” and exciting technicalities. Their own lives were full of great events. What they asked of art was serenity, profundity, to blend their own scattered experiences into one noble picture of life itself, life made beautiful because so wonderfully comprehended. This was the function of Sophocles and his brother-craftsmen.

Beyond the normal lucid beauty of lyrics and dialogue, and beyond the frequent outpourings of splendid eloquence in long speeches, there is a still higher level of poetry which should be noted. Now and again his pages are filled with an unearthly splendour. Reference has been made before to certain isolated lines which combine utter simplicity with bewildering charm.[407] But here and there the poet has given us whole speeches in this divine manner. They are always a comment on the matter in hand, but they are conceived in the spirit of one who “contemplates all time and all existence,” who stands apart from man and sees him in his place amid the workings of the universe. One of these ethereal utterances is the speech[408] of Œdipus to Theseus who has expressed his doubt whether Thebes will ever desert the friendship of Athens; it begins:—

More personal, but instinct with the same glow of imaginative beauty is the soliloquy[409] of Ajax when at the point of death. It is in passages like these that one realizes the value of the restraint which obtains elsewhere; when the author gives his voice full scope the effect is heartshaking. Ajax’ appeal to the sun-god to “check his gold-embossed rein” fills with splendour at a word the heavens which were lowering with horror. It recalls Marlowe’s lines of the same type and effect though in different application, which suffuse the agony of Faust with bitter glory:—

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”.