Atlantic Classics Volume Ii Part 12

II

The Greek genius is so different from the modern English genius that they cannot understand each other. How shall we come to see this clearly? The matter is difficult in the extreme; because we are all soaked in modern feeling, and in America we are all drenched in British influence. The desire of Britain to annex ancient Greece, the deep-felt need that the English writers and poets of the nineteenth century have shown to edge and nudge nearer to Greek feeling, is familiar to all of us. Swinburne expresses his h.e.l.lenic longings by his hymeneal strains, Matthew Arnold by sweetness and light, Gilbert Murray by sweetness and pathos--and all through the divine right of Victorian expansion. It has been a profoundly unconscious development in all these men. They have instinctively and innocently attached their little oil-can to the coattails of Euripides and of the other great Attic writers. They have not been interested in Greek for its own sake. They have been interested in the exploitations of Greece for the purpose of British consumption.

Some people will contend that none of the writers of this school are, properly speaking, professional scholars. Others will contend that professional scholars.h.i.+p is tolerable only because it tends to promote cultivation of a non-professional kind. For instance, Jowett was never regarded as a scholar by the darkest-dyed Oxford experts, and Jebb of Cambridge is undoubtedly regarded as an amateur in Germany, because he descends to making translations. The severest cla.s.sicist is able to talk only about texts. He is too great to do anything else. And yet, properly speaking, these men are all scholars. Murray represents popular scholars.h.i.+p to a degree which would have shocked Matthew Arnold, just as Arnold himself would have been poison to Nauck--Nauck the author of the text of Euripides.

But they are all scholars, and Murray, who is an Australian, and who rose into University prominence on the wings of University Extension, and through his lyric gift rather than through his learning, belongs to Oxford by race and by nature, as well as by adoption. The outsider ought not to confuse him with the whole of Oxford, and the whole of Oxford ought not to disown him after making him the head and front of its h.e.l.lenism so far as the world at large can judge. Murray, as St. Paul would say, is not the inner Oxford; but Murray is the outer Oxford which the inner Oxford cannot too eagerly sniff at or condemn; because he is no accident, but a true-bred Oxonian of the Imperial epoch.

The tendency of universities has ever been to breed cliques and secret societies, to produce embroideries and start hothouses of specialized feeling. They do well in doing this: it is all they can do. We should look upon them as great furnaces of culture, largely social in their influence, which warm and nourish the general temperament of a nation.

Would that in America we had a local school of cla.s.sic cultivation half as interesting as this Oxford Movement--quaint and non-intellectual as it is! It is alive and it is national. While most absurd from the point of view of universal culture, it is most satisfactory from the domestic point of view--as indeed everything in England is. If in America we ever develop any true universities, they will have faults of their own. Their defects will be of a new strain, no doubt, and will reflect our national shortcomings. These thoughts but teach us that we cannot use other people's eyes or other people's eye-gla.s.ses. We have still to grind the lenses through which we shall, in our turn, observe the cla.s.sics.

III

Ancient religion is of all subjects in the world the most difficult.

Every religion, even at the time it was in progress, was always completely misunderstood, and the misconceptions have increased with the ages. They multiply with every monument that is unearthed. If the Eleusinian mysteries were going at full blast to-day, so that we could attend them, as we do the play at Oberammergau, their interpretation would still present difficulties. Mommsen and Rhode would disagree. But ten thousand years from now, when nothing survives except a line out of St. John's Gospel and a tablet stating that Fischer played the part of Christ for three successive decades, many authoritative books will be written about Oberammergau, and reputations will be made over it.

Anything which we approach as religion becomes a nightmare of suggestion, and hales us. .h.i.ther and thither with thoughts beyond the reaches of the soul.

The _Alcestis_ and the _Bacchantes_ are, in this paper, approached with the idea that they are _plays_. This seems not to have been done often enough with Greek plays. They are regarded as examples of the sublime, as forms of philosophic thought, as moral essays, as poems, even as ill.u.s.trations of dramatic law, and they are unquestionably all of these things. But they were primarily plays--intended to pa.s.s the time and exhilarate the emotions. They came into being as plays, and their form and make-up can best be understood by a study of the dramatic business in them. They become poems and philosophy incidentally, and afterwards: they were born as plays. A playwright is always an entertainer, and unless his desire to hold his audience overpoweringly predominates, he will never be a success. It is probable that even with aeschylus,--who stands _hors ligne_ as the only playwright in history who was really in earnest about morality,--we should have to confess that his pa.s.sion as a dramatic artist came _first_. He held his audiences by strokes of tremendous dramatic novelty. Both the stage traditions and the plays themselves bear this out. The fact is that it is not easy to keep people sitting in a theatre; and unless the idea of holding their attention predominates with the author, they will walk out, and he will not be able to deliver the rest of his story.

In the grosser forms of dramatic amus.e.m.e.nt--for example, where a bicycle acrobat is followed by a comic song--we are not compelled to find philosophic depth of idea in the sequence. But in dealing with works of great and refined dramatic genius like the _Tempest_, or the _Bacchantes_, where the emotions played upon are subtly interwoven, there will always be found certain minds which remain unsatisfied with the work of art itself, but must have it explained. Even Beethoven's Sonatas have been supplied with philosophic addenda--statements of their meaning. We know how much Shakespeare's intentions used to puzzle the Germans. Men feel that somewhere at the back of their own consciousness there is a philosophy or a religion with which the arts have some relation. In so far as these affinities are touched upon in a manner that leaves them mysteries, we have good criticism; but when people dogmatize about them, we have bad criticism. In the meantime the great artist goes his way. His own problems are enough for him.

The early critics were puzzled to cla.s.sify the _Alcestis_, and no wonder, for it contains many varieties of dramatic writing. For this very reason it is a good play to take as a sample of Greek spirit and Greek workmans.h.i.+p. It is a little Greek cosmos, and it happens to depict a side of Greek thought which is sympathetic to modern sentiment, so that we seem to be at home in its atmosphere. The _Alcestis_ is thought to be in a cla.s.s by itself. And yet, indeed, under close examination, every Greek play falls into a cla.s.s by itself (there are only about forty-five of them in all), and the maker of each was probably more concerned at the time with the dramatic experiment upon which he found himself launched than he was with any formal cla.s.sification which posterity might a.s.sign to his play.

In the _Alcestis_ Euripides made one of the best plays in the world, full of true pathos, full of jovial humor, both of which sometimes verge upon the burlesque. The happy ending is understood from the start, and none of the grief is painful. Alcestis herself is the good-wife of Greek household myth, who is ready to die for her husband. To this play the bourgeois takes his half-grown family. He rejoices when he hears that it is to be given. The absurdities of the fairy-tale are accepted simply.

Heracles has his club, Death his sword, Apollo his lyre. The women wail, Admetus whines; there is buffoonery, there are tears, there is wit, there is conventional wrangling, and that word-chopping so dear to the Mediterranean theatre, which exists in all cla.s.sic drama and survives in the Punch and Judy show of to-day. And there is the charming return of Heracles with the veiled lady whom he presents to Admetus as a slave for safe keeping, whom Admetus refuses to receive for conventional reasons, but whom every child in the audience feels to be the real Alcestis, even before Heracles unveils her and gives her back into her husband's bosom with speeches on both sides that are like the closing music of a dream.

The audience disperses at the close, feeling that it has spent a happy hour. No sonata of Mozart is more completely beautiful than the _Alcestis_. No comedy of Shakespeare approaches it in perfection. The merit of the piece lies, not in any special idea it conveys, but entirely in the manner in which everything is carried out.

IV

It is clear at a glance that the _Alcestis_ belongs to an epoch of extreme sophistication. Everything has been thought out and polished; every ornament is a poem. If a character has to give five words of explanation or of prayer, it is done in silver. The tone is all the tone of cultivated society, the appeal is an appeal to the refined, casuistical intelligence. The smile of Voltaire is all through Greek literature; and it was not until the age of Louis XIV, or the Regency, that the modern world was again to know a refinement and a sophistication which recall the Greek work. Now, in one word,--this subtlety which pleases us in matters of sentiment is the very thing that separates us from the Greek upon the profoundest questions of philosophy. Where religious or metaphysical truth is touched upon, either Greek sophistication carries us off our feet with a rapture which has no true relation to the subject, or else we are offended by it. We do not understand sophistication. The Greek has pushed aesthetic a.n.a.lysis further than the modern can bear. We follow well enough through the light issues, but when the deeper questions are reached we lose our footing. At this point the modern cries out in applause, 'Religion, philosophy, pure feeling, the soul!'--He cries out, 'Mystic cult, Asiatic influence, Nature wors.h.i.+p,--deep things over there!'--Or else he cries, 'What amazing cruelty, what cynicism!' And yet it is none of these things, but only the artistic perfection of the work which is moving us. We are the victims of clever stage-management.

The cruder intelligence is ever compelled to regard the man of complex mind as a priest or as a demon. The child, for instance, asks about the character in a story, 'But is he a good man or a bad man, papa?' The child must have a moral explanation of anything which is beyond his aesthetic comprehension. So also does the modern intelligence question the Greek.

The matter is complicated by yet another element, namely stage convention. Our modern stage is so different from the cla.s.sic stage that we are bad judges of the Greek playwright's intentions. The quarrels which arise as to allegorical or secondary meanings in a work of art are generally connected with some unfamiliar feature of its setting. A great light is thrown upon any work of art when we show how its form came into being, and thus explain its primary meaning. Such an exposition of the primary or apparent meaning is often sufficient to put all secondary meanings out of court. For instance: It is, as we know, the Germans who have found in Shakespeare a coherent philosophic intention. They think that he wrote plays for the purpose of stating metaphysical truths. The Englishman does not believe this, because the Englishman is familiar with that old English stage work. He knows its traditions, its preoccupation with story-telling, its mundane character, its obliviousness to the sort of thing that Germany has in mind. The Englishman knows the conventions of his own stage, and this protects him from finding mares'-nests in Shakespeare. Again, Shakespeare's sonnets used to be a favorite field for mystical exegesis, until Sir Sidney Lee explained their form by reference to the sixteenth-century sonnet literature of the continent. This put to flight many theories.

In other words, the appeal to convention is the first duty of the scholar. But, unfortunately, in regard to the conventions of the Cla.s.sic Stage, the moderns are all in the dark. Nothing like that stage exists to-day. We are obliged to make guesses as to its intentions, its humor, its relation to philosophy. If the cla.s.sics had only possessed a cabinet-sized drama, like our own, we might have been at home there. But this giant-talk, this megaphone-and-buskin method, offers us a problem in dynamics which staggers the imagination. All we can do is to tread lightly and guess without dogmatizing. The typical Athenian, Euripides, was so much deeper-dyed in skepticism than any one since that day, that really no one has ever lived who could cross-question him--let alone expound the meanings of his plays. In reading Euripides, we find ourselves, at moments, ready to cla.s.sify him as a satirist, and at other moments as a man of feeling. Of course he was both. Sometimes he seems like a religious man, and again, like a charlatan. Of course he was neither. He was a playwright.

V

The _Bacchantes_, like every other Greek play, is the result, first, of the legend, second, of the theatre. There is always some cutting and hacking, due to the difficulty of getting the legend into the building.

Legends differ as to their dramatic possibilities, and the incidents which are to be put on the stage must be selected by the poet. The site of the play must be fixed. Above all, a Chorus must be arranged for.

The choosing of a Chorus is indeed one of the main problems of the tragedian. If he can hit on a natural sort of Chorus he is a made man.

In the _Alcestis_ we saw that the whole background of grief and wailing was one source of the charm of the play. Not only are the tragic parts deepened, but the gayer scenes are set off by this feature. If the fable provides no natural and obvious Chorus, the playwright must bring his Chorus on the stage by stretching the imagination of the audience. He employs a group of servants or of friends of the hero; if the play is a marine piece, he uses sailors. The whole atmosphere of his play depends upon the happiness of his choice.

In the _Agamemnon_ 'the old men left-at-home' form the Chorus. There is enough dramatic power in this one idea to carry a play. It is so natural: the old men are on the spot; they are interested; they are the essence of the story, and yet external to it. These old men are, indeed, the archetype of all choruses--a collection of by-standers, a sort of little dummy audience, intended to steer the great, real audience into a comprehension of the play.

The Greek dramatist found this very useful machine, the Chorus, at his elbow; but he was, on the other hand, greatly controlled by it. It had ways of its own: it inherited dramatic necessities. The element of convention and of theatrical usage is so very predominant in the handling of Greek choruses by the poets, that we have in chorus-work something that may be regarded almost as a constant quality. By studying choruses one can arrive at an idea of the craft of Greek play-writing--one can even separate the conventional from the personal to some extent.

The Greek Chorus has no mind of its own; it merely gives echo to the last dramatic thought. It goes forward and back, contradicts itself, sympathizes with all parties or none, and lives in a limbo. Its real function is to represent the slow-minded man in the audience. It does what he does, it interjects questions and doubts, it delays the plot and indulges in the proper emotions during the pauses. These functions are quite limited, and were completely understood in Greek times; so much so, that in the typical stock tragedy of the aeschylean school certain saws, maxims, and reflections appear over and over again. One of them, of course, was, 'See how the will of the G.o.ds works out in unexpected ways.' Another, 'Let us be pious, and reverence something that is perhaps behind the G.o.ds themselves.' Another, 'This is all very extraordinary: let us hope for the best.' Another, 'Our feelings about right and wrong must somehow be divine; traditional morality, traditional piety, are somehow right.'

Precisely the same reflections are often put in the mouths of the subordinate characters, and for precisely the same purpose. 'Oh, may the quiet life be mine! Give me neither poverty nor riches: for the destinies of the great are ever uncertain.' 'Temptation leads to insolence, and insolence to destruction'; and so forth. Such reflections serve the same purpose, by whomever they are uttered. They underscore the moral of the story and a.s.sure the spectator that he has not missed the point.

As religious tragedy broadened into political and romantic tragedy, the Chorus gained a certain freedom in what might be called its interjectional duty,--its duty, that is to say, of helping the plot along by proper questions, and so forth. It gained also a Protean freedom in its emotional interpretations during pauses. The playwrights apparently discovered that by the use of music and dancing, the most subtle and delicate, nay, the most whimsical varieties of lyrical mood could be conveyed to great audiences. In spite of this license, however, the old duties of the Chorus as guardians of conservative morality remained unchanged; and the stock phrases of exhortation and warning remained _de rigueur_ in the expectation of the audience. Their meaning had become so well known that, by the time of aeschylus, they were expressed in algebraic terms.

No man could to-day unravel a Chorus of aeschylus if only one such Chorus existed. The truncated phrases and elliptical thoughts are clear, to us, because we have learned their meaning through reiteration, and because they always mean the same thing. The poet has a license to provide the Chorus with dark sayings,--dark in form, but simple in import. It was, indeed, his duty to give these phrases an oracular character. In the course of time such phrases became the terror of the copyists. Obscure pa.s.sages became corrupt in process of transcription; and thus we have inherited a whole cla.s.s of choral wisdom which we understand _well enough_ (just as the top gallery understood it _well enough_) to help us in our enjoyment of the play. The obscurity, and perhaps even some part of what we call 'corruption,' are here a part of the stage convention.

Now with regard to the _Bacchantes_--the scheme of having Maenads for a Chorus gave splendid promise of scenic effect; and the fact that, as a logical consequence, these ladies would have to give utterance to the usual maxims of piety, mixed in with the rhapsodies of their professional madness, did not daunt Euripides. He simply makes the Chorus do the usual chorus work, without burdening his mind about character-drawing. Thus the Maenads, at moments when they are not pretending to be Maenads, and are not singing, 'Away to the mountains, O the foot of the stag,' and so on, are obliged to turn the other cheek, and pretend to be interested by-standers--old gaffers, wagging their beards, and quoting the book of Proverbs. The transition from one mood to the other is done in a stroke of lightning, and seems to be independent of the music. That is, it _seems_ to make no difference, so long as the musical schemes are filled out, whether the ladies are singing, 'On with the dance, let joy be unconfined!' or, 'True wisdom differs from sophistry, and consists in avoiding subjects that are beyond mortal comprehension.' All such discrepancies would, no doubt, have been explained if we possessed the music; but the music is lost. It seems, at any rate, certain that the grand public was not expected to understand the word-for-word meaning of choruses; hence their license to be obscure. We get the same impression from the jibes of Aristophanes, whose ridicule of the pompous obscurity of aeschylus makes us suspect that the audiences could not follow the grammar in the lofty parts of the tragedy. They accepted the drum-roll of horror, and understood the larger grammar of tragedy, much as we are now forced to do in reading the plays.

It would seem that by following the technique of tragedy, and by giving no thought to small absurdities, Euripides got a double effect out of his Maenads and no one observed that anything was wrong. In one place he resorts to a dramatic device, which was perhaps well known in his day, namely, the 'conversion' of a bystander. After the First Messenger has given the great description of Dionysus's doings in the mountains, the Chorus, or one of them, with overpowering yet controlled emotion, steps forward and says, 'I tremble to speak free words in the presence of my King; yet nevertheless be it said: Dionysus is no less a G.o.d than the greatest of them!' This reference to the duty of a subject is probably copied from a case where the Chorus was made up of local bystanders. In the mouth of a Maenad the proclamation is logically ridiculous; yet so strange are the laws of what 'goes' on the stage that it may have been effective even here.

Some of the choruses in the _Bacchantes_ are miracles of poetic beauty, of savage pa.s.sion, of liquid power. It is hard to say exactly what they are, but they are wonderful. And behind all, there gleams from the whole play a sophistication as deep as the aegean.

VI

There is one thing that we should never do in dealing with anything Greek. We should not take a sc.r.a.p of the Greek mind and keep on examining it until we find a familiar thought in it. No bit of Greek art is to be viewed as a thing in itself. It is always a fragment, and gets its value from the whole. Every bit of carved stone picked up in Athens is a piece of architecture; so is every speech in a play, every phrase in a dialogue. You must go back and bring in the whole Theatre or the whole Academy, and put back the fragment in its place by means of ladders, before you can guess at its meaning. The inordinate significance that seems to gleam from every broken toy of Greece, results from this very quality--that the object is a part of something else. Just because the thing has no meaning by itself, it implies so much. Somehow it drags the whole life of the Greek nation before you.

The favorite Greek maxim, 'Avoid excess,' does the same. It keeps telling you to remember yesterday and to-morrow; to remember the _palaestra_ and the market-place; above all to remember that the very opposite of what you say is also true. Wherever you are, and whatever doing, you must remember the _rest_ of the Greek world.

It is no wonder that the Greeks could not adopt the standards and contrivances of other nations, while their own standards and contrivances resulted from such refined and perpetual balancing and shaving of values. This refinement has become part of their daily life; and whether one examines a drinking cup or a dialogue or a lyric, and whether the thing be from the age of Homer or from the age of Alexander, the fragment always gives us a glimpse into the same Greek world. The foundation of this world seems to be the Myth; and as the world grew it developed in terms of Myth. The Greek mind had only one background. Athletics and Statuary, Epic and Drama, Religion and Art, Skepticism and Science expressed themselves through the same myths. In this lies the fascination of Greece for us. What a complete cosmos it is! And how different from any other civilization! Modern life, like modern language, is a monstrous amalgam, a conglomeration and mess of idioms from every age and every clime. The cla.s.sic Greek hangs together like a wreath. It has been developed rapidly, during a few hundred years, and has an inner harmony like the temple. Language and temple--each was an apparition; each is, in its own way, perfect.

Consider wherein Rome differed from Greece. The life of the Romans was a patchwork, like our own. Their religion was formal, their art imported, their literature imitative, their aims were practical, their interests unimaginative. All social needs were controlled by political considerations. This sounds almost like a description of modern life; and it explains why the Romans are so close to us. Cicero, Horace, Caesar, Antony, are moderns. But Alcibiades, Socrates, Pericles, and the rest take their stand in Greek fable. Like Pisistratus, Solon, and Lycurgus, they melt into legend and belong to the realms of the imagination.

No other people ever bore the same relation to their arts that the Greeks bore; and in this lies their charm. When the Alexandrine critics began to cla.s.sify poetry and to discuss perfection, they never even mentioned the Roman poetry, although all of the greatest of it was in existence. Why is this? It is because no Roman poem is a poem at all from the Greek point of view. It is too individual, too clever, and, generally, too political. Besides, it is not in Greek. The nearest modern equivalent to the development of the whole Greek world of art is to be found in German contrapuntal music. No one except a German has ever written a true sonata or a symphony, in the true polyphonic German style. There are _tours de force_ done by other nationalities; but the natural idiom of this music is Teutonic.

I am not condemning the Latins, or the moderns. Indeed, there is in Horace something n.o.bler and more humane than in all Olympus. The Greeks, moreover, seem in their civic incompetence like children, when contrasted with the Romans or with the moderns. But in power of utterance, within their own crafts, the Greeks are unapproachable. Let us now speak of matters of which we know very little.

The statues on the Parthenon stand in a region where direct criticism cannot reach them, but which trigonometry may, to some extent, determine. Their beauty probably results from an artistic knowledge so refined, a sophistication so exact, that, as we gaze, we lose the process and see only results. A Greek architect could have told you just what lines of a.n.a.lysis must be followed in order to get these effects in grouping and in relief. It is all, no doubt, built up out of _tonic_ and _dominant_--but the manual of counter-point has been lost. As the tragic poet fills the stage with the legend, so the sculptor fills the metope with the legend. Both are closely following artistic usage: each is merely telling the old story with new refinement. And whether we gaze at the actors on the stage or at the figures in the metope, whether we study a lyric or listen to a dialogue, we are in communion with the same genius, the same legend. The thing which moves and delights us is a unity.

This Genius is not hard to understand. Any one can understand it. That is the proof of its greatness. As Boccaccio said of Dante, not learning but good wits are needed to appreciate him. One cannot safely look toward the mind of the modern scholar for an understanding of the Greek mind, because the modern scholar is a specialist--a thing the Greek abhors. If a scholar to-day knows the acoustics of the Greek stage, that is thought to be a large enough province for him. He is not allowed to be an authority on the scenery. In the modern scholar's mind everything is in cubby-holes; and everybody to-day wants to become an authority.

Every one, moreover, is very serious to-day; and it does not do to be too serious about Greek things, because the very genius of Greece has in it a touch of irony, which combines with our seriousness to make a heavy, indigestible paste. The Greek will always laugh at you if he can, and the only hope is to keep him at arm's length, and deal with him in the spirit of social life, of the world, of the _beau monde_, and of large conversation. His chief merit is to stimulate this spirit. The less we dogmatize about his works and ways, the freer will the world be of secondary, second-rate commentaries. The more we study his works and ways, the fuller will the world become of intellectual force.

The Greek cla.s.sics are a great help in tearing open those strong envelopes in which the cultivation of the world is constantly getting glued up. They helped Europe to cut free from theocratic tyranny in the late Middle Ages. They held the Western world together after the fall of the Papacy. They gave us modern literature: indeed, if one considers all that comes from Greece, one can hardly imagine what the world would have been like without her. The lamps of Greek thought are still burning in marble and in letters. The complete little microcosm of that Greek society hangs forever in the great macrocosm of the moving world, and sheds rays which dissolve prejudice, making men thoughtful, rational, and gay. The greatest intellects are ever the most powerfully affected by it; but no one escapes. Nor can the world ever lose this benign influence, which must, so far as philosophy can imagine, qualify human life forever.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

In Praise of Old Ladies

By Lucy Martin Donnelly