Volume 1 — CHAPTER XII. ÆSCHYLUS. (continued 2)

The draught of prophecy is now drained to the very dregs. Nothing remains but for Cassandra to enter the palace-doors of Hades. She approaches them step by step, bewailing, after the fashion of Greek tragedy, her own woes, and those of Priam's family. Suddenly she starts. The scent of blood assails her nostrils, and, like a steer that shivers at the gory shambles, she draws back. The Chorus say, "It is only the smell of sacrifice upon the hearth." But the weird woman discovers a very different odor of coming slaughter: "To me the reek is like the breath of charnels." Still forward, though shrinking from the unseen, unavoidable doom, she must advance, invoking the avenger of herself and Agamemnon, and calling on the all-seeing sun. Her last words are uttered in the same spirit as Macbeth's soliloquy upon the point of battle; they intensify and elevate the tragic moment by drawing the whole destiny of mortals into harmony with her own doom:

Thus, at the last, tranquil and stately, she touches the door, enters, and it shuts behind her. For a while the Chorus stand alone, and sing a low, brief chant of terror. The scene is empty, and the palace-front towers up into calm light. Then, when our nerves have been strained to the cracking-point of expectation by Cassandra's prophecy and by the silence that succeeds it, from within the house is heard the deep-chested cry of Agamemnon: "O me, I am stricken with a stroke of death!" This shriek is the most terrible incident in all tragedy, owing to its absolute and awful timeliness, its adequacy to the situation. The whole dramatic apparatus of the play has been, as it were, constructed with a view to it; yet, though we expect it, our heart stops when at last it comes. The stillness, apparently of home repose, but really of death, which broods upon the house during those last moments, while every second brings the hero nearer to his fate, has in it a concentrated awfulness that surpasses even the knocking at the gate in Macbeth. Then comes the cry of Agamemnon, and the whole structure of terror descends upon us. It is as though an avalanche had been gathering above our heads and gradually loosening—loosening with fearfully accelerated ratio of movement as the minutes fly—until a single word will be enough to make it crumble. That word, uttered from behind the stately palace-walls, startling the guilty and oppressive silence, intimating that the workers have done working, that the victim has been taken in their toils, is nothing less than the shriek of the smitten king. It sounds once for the death-blow given; and once again it sounds to mark a second stroke. Then shriek and silence are alike forgotten in the downfall of the mass of dread. The Chorus are torn asunder by hurried and conflicting counsels, eddying like dead leaves caught and tossed in the clutches of a tempest. Horror huddles upon horror, as the spectacle of slaughter is itself revealed—the king's corpse smoking in the silver bath, Cassandra motionless in death beside him. Above them stands Clytemnestra, shouldering her murderous axe, with open nostrils and dilated eyes, glorying in her deed, cherishing the blood-drops on her arms and dress and sprinkled bosom; while, invisible to mortal eyes, the blood-swilled demon of the house sits eying her as its next victim. Ægisthus—craven, but spiteful—slinks forth, hyena-like, after the accomplished act, to trample on the hero and insult his grave.

Some such spectacle as this was revealed to the Athenians by the rolling back of the eccyclema at the end of the Agamemnon. The triumph of adulterous Clytemnestra and cowardly Ægisthus would, however, have been far from tragic in its utter moral baseness, did we not know that this drama was to be succeeded by another which should right the balance. Perhaps this is the reason why the Oresteia is the only extant trilogy. Its three parts are so closely interlinked that to separate them was impossible. The preservers of the Agamemnon were forced to preserve the Choëphorœ; the preservers of the Choëphorœ could not dispense with the Eumenides.

The Chorus of the Agamemnon demands separate criticism. The Chorus in all Greek tragedy performs, it has been often said, the part of an ideal spectator. It comments on the plot, not daring so much actively to interfere, as uttering reflections on the conduct of the dramatis personæ, and referring all obscure events to the arbitrament of heaven. Thus the Chorus is a mirror of the poet's mind, an index to the moral which he inculcates, an inspired critic of each movement in the play. The choric odes, introduced at turning-points in the main action, are lyrical inter-breathings that connect the past and future with the present. In the plays of Æschylus the Chorus, as I have already shown, is, moreover, personally interested in the drama. In the case of the Agamemnon the fortunes of the burghers of Mycenæ are engaged in the success or failure of Clytemnestra's scheme. At the same time, knowing the whole dark history of the house of Atreus, they foresee the perils which their master, as a member of that family, must run. It follows that their songs embody the moral teaching of the tragedy itself without lapsing into mere sententiousness. Their sympathies, antipathies, and interests add a vital importance to their utterance. The burden of all these odes is that punishment for crime, however long delayed or tortuous in its operation, is inevitable. The grandeur of the whole work depends in a great measure on the force with which this idea is wrought out lyrically, sometimes by bold images, sometimes by dark innuendoes, repeated like a mystic rede, or tossed upon the eddies of a wizard chant. From beginning to ending these ancient men are adverse to the sons of Atreus, gloomily conscious that they cannot prosper. While recognizing the justice of their cause against Paris, who had transgressed the laws of hospitable Zeus, they yet remember Agamemnon's swiftness to shed his daughter's blood, the old Erinnys which pursues the race, the wholesale slaughter of Achaian citizens before Troy's walls. These recollections inspire them with uneasiness before the Messenger appears. Their doubts are confirmed by his news that the altars of the Trojans had been dishonored, while their mistrust of Clytemnestra adds yet a deeper hue to their alarm. Then comes the scene with Cassandra. No more doubt remains; and the only question is how to act. Even at the last moment the Chorus do not lose their faith. They defy Clytemnestra, telling her to her face that her crime must be avenged, that the curse must be worked out to the full, and that justice cannot fail to triumph. At the very end they rise to prophecy: you, yourself, unfriended in the end, shall fall; the doer, when Zeus wills, shall suffer for his deed; remember, therefore, that Orestes lives.

The choric interludes of the Agamemnon, though burdened with the mystery of sin and fate, and tuned to music stern and lofty, abound in strains of pathetic and of tender poetry, deep-reaching to the very fount of tears, unmatched by aught else in the Greek language. The demiurge who gave a shape to Titans and to Furies mingled tears with the clay of the men he wrought, and star-fire with the beauty of his women, and even for the birds of the air and the wild creatures of the woods he felt a sympathy half human, half divine. In the first Chorus, Æschylus compares the Atreidæ to eagles robbed of their young, whose cries are answered by Zeus, Phœbus, or Pan. "Hearing the shrill clamor of these airy citizens, he sendeth after-vengeance on the robbers." And, again, Artemis exacts penalty for the hare whom the eagles bore off to their nests, a prey. "So kindly disposed is the fair goddess to the tender young of fierce lions, and to the suckling brood of all beasts that range the field and forest." Thus the large philosophy of the poet includes justice for all living things, and even dumb creatures have their rights, which men may not infringe.

The depth of his human pathos no mere plummet-line of scholarship or criticism can fathom. Before the vision of Iphigeneia at the altar we must needs be silent: "Letting fall her saffron-colored skirts to earth, she smote each slayer with a piteous arrow from her eyes, eloquent as in a picture, desiring speech, since oftentimes beside the well-spread board within her father's hall she sang, and maidenly, with chaste voice, honored the pæan raised in happy times at festal sacrifice of her dear sire." We do not need the sententious moral of Lucretius uttered four centuries later, tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum, to point the pathos which Æschylus, with a profounder instinct, draws by one touch from the contrast between then and now. In the same strain is the description of Menelaus abandoned in his home by Helen: "She, leaving to her fellow-citizens the din of shielded hosts, and armings of the fleet with spears, bringing to Ilion destruction for a dower, went lightly through the doors, dishonorably brave; and many a sigh was uttered by the bards of the palace, while they sang—O house! O house, and rulers! O marriage-bed, and pressure on the pillows of her head who loved her lord! He stands by in silence, dishonored, but without reproaches, noting with anguish of soul that she is fled. Yea, in his longing after her who is beyond the sea, a phantom will seem to rule his house. The grace of goodly statues hath grown irksome to his gaze, and in his widowhood of weary eyes all beauty fades away. But dreams that glide in sleep with sorrow visit him, conveying a vain joy; for vain it is, when one hath seemed to see good things, and lo, escaping through his hands, the vision flies apace on wings that follow on the paths of sleep."

To read the Greek aright in this wonderful lyric, so concentrated in its imagery, and so direct in its conveyance of the very soul of passion, is no light task; but far more difficult it is to render it into another language. Yet, even thus, we feel that this poem of defrauded desire and everlasting farewell, of vain outgoings of the spirit after vanished joy, is written not merely for Menelaus and the Greeks, but for all who stretch forth empty hands to clasp the dreams of dear ones, and then turn away, face-downward on the pillow, from the dawn, to weep or strain hot eyes that shed no tears. Touched by the same truth of feeling, which includes all human nature in its sympathy, is the lament, shortly after uttered by the Chorus, for the numberless fair men who died before Troy town. Ares, the grim gold-exchanger, who barters the bodies of men, sends home a little dust shut up within a narrow urn, and wife and father water this with tears, and cry—Behold, he perished nobly in a far land, fighting for a woman, for another's wife. And others there are who come not even thus again to their old home; but barrows on Troy plain enclose their fair young flesh, and an alien soil is their sepulchre. This picture of beautiful dead men, warriors and horsemen, in the prime of manhood, lying stark and cold, with the dishonor of the grave upon their comely hair, and with the bruises of the battle on limbs made for love, is not meant merely for Achaians, but for all—for us, perchance, whose dearest moulder on Crimean shores or Indian plains, for whom the glorious faces shine no more; but at best some tokens, locks of hair, or books, or letters, come to stay our hunger unassuaged. How truly and how faithfully the Greek poet sang for all ages, and for all manner of men, may be seen by comparing the strophes of this Chorus with the last rhapsody but one of the chants outpoured in America by Walt Whitman, to commemorate the events of the great war. The pathos which unites these poets, otherwise so different in aim and sentiment, is deep as nature, real as life; but from this common root of feeling springs in the one verse a spotless lily of pure Hellenic form, in the other a mystical thick growth of fancy, where thoughts brood and nestle amid tufted branches; for the powers of classic and of modern singers upon the same substance of humanity are diverse.

The Persæ is certainly one of the earliest among the extant tragedies of Æschylus, since it was produced upon the stage in 473 B.C., seven years after the battle of Salamis. This drama can scarcely be called a tragedy in the common sense of the word. It is rather a tragic show, designed to grace a national festival and to preserve the memory of a great victory. That purpose it fulfilled effectively; the events it celebrates were still recent; the author of the play had fought himself at Salamis, and the whole Athenian people were glowing with the patriotic impulse that had placed them first among the states of Hellas. Æschylus was, however, too deeply conscious of the spirit of his art to let the Persæ sink into the rank of pageantry or triumph. The defeat of Xerxes and his host supplied him with a splendid tragic instance of pride humbled, and greatness brought to nothing, through one man's impiety and pride. The moral that the poet wished to draw is put into the mouth of Darius, whose ghost, evoked by Atossa and the Chorus, completes the tale of Persian disasters by predicting the battle of Platæa. "Swiftly are the oracles accomplished. I looked for length of days; but when a man hastes, God helps to urge him on. It was my son's insolence, in chaining the holy Hellespont, and thinking he could stay the Bosporus, the stream divine, from flowing, which brought these woes. He thought to make a path for his army, to hold Poseidon and the powers of Heaven in bondage—he a mortal, and they gods! Few of his great host shall come again to Susa. In Hellas they must pay the penalty of arrogance and godless hearts. Coming to that land, they thought it no shame to rob the statues of the gods and burn the shrines; the altars were cast down, the temples overthrown. Therefore, as they did evil, evil shall they suffer. Heaps of dead upon Platæa's plain shall tell to the third generation, by speechless signs appealing to the eyes of men, that no man mortal may dare raise his heart too high. For insolence blooms forth and bears the crop of disaster, whence one reaps a harvest of tears. Seeing which payment for these crimes, remember Hellas and Athens. Nor let a man, in scorn of his own lot, desire another's good, and spill much wealth; for Zeus, in sooth, stands high above, a grievous schoolmaster, to tame excessive lifting-up of hearts." Nowhere else, it may be said, has Æschylus thought fit so decidedly to moralize his dramatic motive, or so clearly to state in simple words his philosophy of Nemesis. The ghost of Darius, as may be conjectured from this address, does not belong to the same race as the Banquos and Hamlets of our stage. He is a political phantom, a monarch evoked from his mausoleum to give sage counsel, and well-informed about the affairs of his empire.

By laying the scene of this drama at Susa, the ancient capital of the Persian kings, Æschylus was enabled to adopt a style of treatment peculiarly flattering to his Greek audience. The Persians are made to bewail their own misfortunes, to betray the rottenness of their vast empire, and to lament the wretchedness of nations subject to the caprice of irresponsible and selfish princes. Inured to slavery, they hug their chains; and, though in rags, Xerxes is still to them a demi-god. The servility of Oriental courtiers, the pomp and pride of Oriental princes, the obsequious ceremonies and the inflated flatteries of barbarians, are translated for Greek ears and eyes into gorgeous forms by the poet, whose own genius had something Asiatic in its tone and temper. Many occasions for grim irony are afforded by this mode of handling, whereof the famous speech of Atossa on the clothes of Xerxes, if that, indeed, be genuine, and the inability of the Chorus, through servile shyness, to address the ghost of Darius, furnish the most obvious examples. A finer and subtler note is struck in the dialogue between Atossa and the Chorus just before the news of the defeat at Salamis arrives. She asks where Athens may be found:

This offers the poet an opportunity for putting into the mouth of the Persian coryphæus a flattering account of his own nation: No monarch have they, few are they, but all men of might, and strong enough to rout the myriad bowmen of the Persian host with spear and shield. The naïveté of the description—in itself highly complimentary to the Athenians—must have made it effective on the stage. We may fancy how the cheering of the men of Marathon re-echoed from the Dionysian theatre, and filled Athene's hill "song-wise" with sound, as each triumphant trochaic leaped forth from the Persian lips. At the same time the tragic irony is terrible, for the queen is on the point of hearing from the Messenger that this mere handful of spearmen crushed her son's host, countless as the stars, in one day upon sea and shore. The real point of that fierce duel of two nations, which decided the future of the human race—the contrast between barbarians and men in whom the spirit was alive, between slaves driven to the fight like sheep and freemen acting consciously as their own will determined, between the brute force of multitudes and the inspired courage of a few heroes—has never been expressed more radiantly than in this play. No language of criticism can do justice to the incomparable brilliancy and vigor with which the tale of Salamis is told. We must remember, in reading the speeches of the Messenger, that this is absolutely the first page of Greek history. It came before Herodotus, and the soldier-poet, who had seen what he narrated, was no less conscious than we are, after all our study, of the real issues, of the momentous interests at stake. Never elsewhere has contemporary history been written thus. In these triumphant rheseis Æschylus did not choose to maintain a bare dramatic propriety. The herald is relating disaster after disaster; yet the elation of the poet pulses through his speech, and he cannot be sad. We feel that, while he is dinning into the ears of the barbarian empress and her courtiers this panegyric of Hellenic heroism, he is really speaking to an Attic audience. The situation is, however, sufficiently sustained for theatrical purposes by the dignity wherewith Atossa meets her ruin. She shows herself a queen in spite of all, and the front she presents to "the sea of troubles" (κακῶν πέλαγος) breaking over the whole Asian empire is fully adequate to the magnitude of the calamity. It is difficult to believe that the speech written for her by Æschylus, when she returns with the libations for Darius, was not intended, by its grandly decorative style, to convey the impression of calmness in the midst of sorrow. Atossa is great enough to be self-possessed, and to dwell with tender thoughtfulness upon the gifts of nature beloved by the powers of darkness. The lines are these:

This passage is a fair example of the "mighty line" of Æschylus, employed for purposes of pure adornment. The pomp and circumstance of tragic style, which he so well knew how to use, gave unrivalled dignity to his narration. Yet this style, even in the days of Aristophanes, had come to sound extravagant, while its occasional bombast, as in the famous periphrasis for dust,

reminds a modern reader too much of the padding of the actors' chests, the cothurnus, brazen mouthpiece, and heightened mask required by the huge size of the Athenian theatre. The phrases invented in the Frogs to express the peculiarities of the Æschylean exaggeration, κομποφακελορρήμονα, or ἱππολόφων λόγων κορυθαίολα νείκη, or, again,

very cleverly parody the effect of the more tumid passages. Yet when Æschylus chose to be simple he combined majesty with grace, strength with beauty, and speed with volume, in a style which soars higher and reaches farther than the polished perfection of Sophocles or the artistic elegance of Euripides. The descriptions of Ionia and Doria drawing Xerxes' chariot in Atossa's dream, and of the education of mankind in the Prometheus, belong to his more pure and chastened manner. The famous speech in which Clytemnestra tells of the leaping up of watchfire after watchfire from Troy to Mycenæ, of Ida flashing the flame to the Hermæan cliff of Lemnos, of Athos taking it up and sending it with joy across the gulf to far Makistus, of the Messapian warders lighting their dry heath and speeding the herald-blaze in brightness like the moon to Cithæron, and thence, by peak and promontory, over fen and plain and flickering armlet of the sea, onward to Agamemnon's palace-tower—this brilliant picture, glittering with the rarest jewels of imaginative insight, can only be coupled with the Salaminian speeches of the Persæ. They stand in a place apart. Purity, lucidity, rapidity, energy, elevation, and fiery intensity of style are here divinely mingled. There is no language and no metre equal to the Greek and the iambic for such resonant, elastic, leaping periods as these. The firm grasp upon reality preserved by Æschylus, even in his most passionate and most imaginative moments, adds force unrivalled to these descriptive passages.

At the same time he surpassed all the poets of his nation in a certain Shakespearian concentration of phrase. The invectives uttered by Cassandra against Clytemnestra, and her broken exclamations, abound in examples of energetic, almost grotesque, imagery, not to be paralleled in Greek literature. The whole of the Seven against Thebes, and in particular that choric ode which describes the capture and sack of a town, might be cited with a similar intention. But perhaps the strongest instance of this more than Greek vehemence of expression is the denunciation hurled by Phœbus at the Furies in his Delphian shrine:

Another Shakespearian quality in the Æschylean use of language and of imagery might be illustrated from his metaphors. He calls the ocean a forest—πόντιον ἄλσος or ἁλίρρυτον ἄλσος—as though he would remind us of the great sea-beasts that roam like wolves or lions down beneath the waves. The vultures are ὀξύστομοι Ζηνὸς ἀκραγεῖς κύνες. The eagle is Διὸς πτηνὸς κύων δαφοινός. The Furies of Clytemnestra are μητρὸς ἔγκοτοι κύνες. The Argives who poured forth from the Wooden Horse to plunder Troy are called Ἀργεῖον δάκος, ἵππου νεοσσός, ἀσπιδηφόρος λεώς. The flame of the thunderbolt becomes πυρὸς ἀμφήκης βόστρυχος. The beacon-flame on Ægiplanctus is a huge beard, φλογὸς μέγαν πώγωνα. In all these metaphors we trace an imaginative energy which the Greek poets usually sought to curb. When we speak of the mighty line of Æschylus, we naturally remember verses like these:

and

which carry with them a massive weight, not only of sound and words, but also of meaning and of imagery. No wonder that Aristophanes jestingly compared the gravity of the style of Æschylus with that of Euripides in balances. A single phrase of the former's causes a score of the latter's to kick the beam; and as the sonorous nouns, flanked by their polysyllabic epithets, advance, the earth is seen to shake as though battalions were hurrying to the charge, and squadrons of cavalry with thundering horses' hoofs and waving plumes were prancing on the plain.

The difficulty of Æschylus, when it is not due, as in the Suppliants and in the choric odes of the Agamemnon, to a ruined text, may be ascribed to the rapidity of his transition from one thought to another, to the piling-up of images and metaphors, and to the remote and mystic nature of the ideas he is seeking for the first time to express in language. Where even simple prose could scarcely convey his meaning, he presents a cloud of highly poetic figures to our mind. This kind of difficulty, however, like that which the student has to meet in Pindar, is straightforward. You know when you are at fault, and why, and how alone you can arrive at a solution of the problem. The difficulty of Sophocles is more insidious. It is possible to think you understand him, when you really do not; to feel his drift, and yet to find it hard to construe his language. In this case the difficulty arises from the poet's desire to convey his meaning in a subtle, many-sided, pregnant, and yet smooth style. The more you think over it, the more you get from it. Euripides belonged to an age of facile speech, fixed phraseology, and critical analysis: it therefore follows that he presents fewer obvious difficulties to the reader; and this, perhaps, was one reason for his popularity among the early scholars of the modern age. At any rate, he does not share with Æschylus the difficulty that arose when a poet of intense feeling and sublime imagination strove to grapple with deep and intricate thoughts before language had become a scientific instrument.

In conclusion I would once again return to that doctrine of παθήματα μαθήματα, connected with a definite conception of the divine government and based upon a well-considered theory of human responsibility, which may be traced throughout the plays of Æschylus. To this morality his drama owes its unity and vigor, inasmuch as all the plots constructed by the poet both presuppose and illustrate it. The conviction that what a man sows he will reap, and that the world is not ruled by blind chance, is, in one sense or another, the most solid ethical acquisition of humanity. Amid so much else that seems to shift in morals and in religion, it affords firm ground for action. This vital moral faith the Greeks held as securely, at least, as we do; and the theology with which their highest teachers—men like Æschylus, Pindar, Plato—sought to connect it, tended to weaken its effect far less than any other systems of divinity have done. We are too apt to forget this, while we fix our attention upon the unrivalled beauty of Greek art. In reality there are few nations whose fine literature combines so much æsthetic splendor with direct, sound, moral doctrine; and this, not because the poets strove to preach, but because their minds were healthily imbued with human wisdom. Except in the works of Milton, we English, for example, can show no poetical exposition of a moral theory at all equal to that of Æschylus. But while Milton sets forth his doctrine as a portion of divine revelation, and vitiates it with the dross of dogmatism, Æschylus shows the law implicit in the history of men and heroes: it is inferred by him intuitively from the facts of spiritual life, as apprehended by the consciousness of the Greeks in their best age.

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