Athens: Its Rise and Fall Part 38

Death by a brother's hand--dark fratricide, Murdering thyself a brother--shall be thine.

Yea, while I curse thee, on the murky deep Of the primeval h.e.l.l I call! Prepare These men their home, dread Tartarus! G.o.ddesses, Whose shrines are round me--ye avenging Furies!

And thou, oh Lord of Battle, who hast stirred Hate in the souls of brethren, hear me--hear me!-- And now, 'tis past!--enough!--depart and tell The Theban people, and thy fond allies, What blessings, from his refuge with the Furies, The blind old Oedipus awards his sons!" [352]

As is usual with Sophocles, the terrific strength of these execrations is immediately followed by a soft and pathetic scene between Antigone and her brother. Though crushed at first by the paternal curse, the spirit of Polynices so far recovers its native courage that he will not listen to the prayer of his sister to desist from the expedition to Thebes, and to turn his armies back to Argos. "What," he says,

"Lead back an army that could deem I trembled!"

Yet he feels the mournful persuasion that his death is doomed; and a glimpse of the plot of the "Antigone" is opened upon us by his prayer to his sister, that if he perish, they should lay him with due honours in the tomb. The exquisite loveliness of Antigone's character touches even Polynices, and he departs, saying,

"With the G.o.ds rests the balance of our fate; But thee, at least--oh never upon thee May evil fall! Thou art too good for sorrow!"

The chorus resume their strains, when suddenly thunder is heard, and Oedipus hails the sign that heralds him to the shades. Nothing can be conceived more appalling than this omen. It seems as if Oedipus had been spared but to curse his children and to die. He summons Theseus, tells him that his fate is at hand, and that without a guide he himself will point out the spot where he shall rest. Never may that spot be told--that secret and solemn grave shall be the charm of the land and a defence against its foes. Oedipus then turns round, and the instinct within guides him as he gropes along. His daughters and Theseus follow the blind man, amazed and awed. "Hither," he says,

"Hither--by this way come--for this way leads The unseen conductor of the dead [353]--and she Whom shadows call their queen! [354] Oh light, sweet light, Rayless to me--mine once, and even now I feel thee palpable, round this worn form, Clinging in last embrace--I go to shroud The waning life in the eternal Hades!"

Thus the stage is left to the chorus, and the mysterious fate of Oedipus is recited by the Nuntius, in verses which Longinus has not extolled too highly. Oedipus had led the way to a cavern, well known in legendary lore as the spot where Perithous and Theseus had pledged their faith, by the brazen steps which make one of the entrances to the infernal realms;

"Between which place and the Thorician stone-- The hollow thorn, and the sepulchral pile He sat him down."

And when he had performed libations from the stream, and laved, and decked himself in the funeral robes, Jove thundered beneath the earth, and the old man's daughters, aghast with horror, fell at his knees with sobs and groans.

"Then o'er them as they wept, his hands he clasped, And 'Oh my children,' said he, 'from this day Ye have no more a father--all of me Withers away--the burden and the toil Of mine old age fall on ye nevermore.

Sad travail have ye home for me, and yet Let one thought breathe a balm when I am gone-- The thought that none upon the desolate world Loved you as I did; and in death I leave A happier life to you!'

Thus movingly, With clinging arms and pa.s.sionate sobs, the three Wept out aloud, until the sorrow grew Into a deadly hush--nor cry nor wail Starts the drear silence of the solitude.

Then suddenly a bodiless voice is heard And fear came cold on all. They shook with awe, And horror, like a wind, stirred up their hair.

Again, the voice--again--'Ho! Oedipus, Why linger we so long?

Come--hither--come.'"

Oedipus then solemnly consigns his children to Theseus, dismisses them, and Theseus alone is left with the old man.

"So groaning we depart--and when once more We turned our eyes to gaze, behold, the place Knew not the man! The king alone was there, Holding his spread hands o'er averted brows As if to shut from out the quailing gaze The horrid aspect of some ghastly thing That nature durst not look on. So we paused Until the king awakened from the terror, And to the mother Earth, and high Olympus, Seat of the G.o.ds, he breathed awe--stricken prayer But, how the old man perished, save the king, Mortal can ne'er divine; for bolt, nor levin, Nor blasting tempest from the ocean borne, Was heard or seen; but either was he rapt Aloft by wings divine, or else the shades, Whose darkness never looked upon the sun, Yawned in grim mercy, and the rent abyss Ingulf'd the wanderer from the living world."

Such, sublime in its wondrous power, its appalling mystery, its dim, religious terror, is the catastrophe of the "Oedipus at Coloneus."

The lines that follow are devoted to the lamentations of the daughters, and appear wholly superfluous, unless we can consider that Sophocles desired to indicate the connexion of the "Oedipus" with the "Antigone," by informing us that the daughters of Oedipus are to be sent to Thebes at the request of Antigone herself, who hopes, in the tender courage of her nature, that she may perhaps prevent the predicted slaughter of her brothers.

VII. Coming now to the tragedy of "Antigone," we find the prophecy of Oedipus has been fulfilled--the brothers have fallen by the hand of each other--the Argive army has been defeated--Creon has obtained the tyranny, and interdicts, on the penalty of death, the burial of Polynices, whose corpse remains guarded and unhonoured. Antigone, mindful of her brother's request to her in their last interview, resolves to brave the edict, and perform those rites so indispensably sacred in the eyes of a Greek. She communicates her resolution to her sister Ismene, whose character, still feeble and commonplace, is a perpetual foil to the heroism of Antigone. She acts upon her resolutions, baffles the vigilant guards, buries the corpse. Creon, on learning that his edict has been secretly disobeyed, orders the remains to be disinterred, and in a second attempt Antigone is discovered, brought before him, and condemned to death. Haemon, the son of Creon, had been affianced to Antigone. On the news of her sentence he seeks Creon, and after a violent scene between the two, which has neither the power nor the dignity common to Sophocles, departs with vague menaces. A short but most exquisite invocation to love from the chorus succeeds, and in this, it may be observed, the chorus express much left not represented in the action--they serve to impress on the spectator all the irresistible effects of the pa.s.sion which the modern artist would seek to represent in some moving scene between Antigone and Haemon. The heroine herself now pa.s.ses across the stage on her way to her dreadful doom, which is that of living burial in "the cavern of a rock." She thus addresses the chorus--

"Ye, of the land wherein my fathers dwelt, Behold me journeying to my latest bourne!

Time hath no morrow for these eyes. Black Orcus, Whose court hath room for all, leads my lone steps, E'en while I live, to shadows. Not for me The nuptial blessing or the marriage hymn: Acheron, receive thy bride!

(Chorus.) Honoured and mourned Nor struck by slow disease or violent hand, Thy steps glide to the grave! Self-judged, like Freedom, [355]

Thou, above mortals gifted, shalt descend All living to the shades.

Antigone. Methinks I have heard-- So legends go--how Phrygian Niobe (Poor stranger) on the heights of Sipylus Mournfully died. The hard rock, like the tendrils O' the ivy, clung and crept unto her heart-- Her, nevermore, dissolving into showers, Pale snows desert; and from her sorrowful eyes, As from unfailing founts adown the cliffs, Fall the eternal dews. Like her, the G.o.d Lulls me to sleep, and into stone!"

Afterward she adds in her beautiful lament, "That she has one comfort --that she shall go to the grave dear to her parents and her brother."

The grief of Antigone is in perfect harmony with her character--it betrays no repentance, no weakness--it is but the natural sorrow, of youth and womanhood, going down to that grave which had so little of hope in the old Greek religion. In an Antigone on our stage we might have demanded more reference to her lover; but the Grecian heroine names him not, and alludes rather to the loss of the woman's lot of wedlock than the loss of the individual bridegroom. But it is not for that reason that we are to conclude, with M. Schlegel and others, that the Greek women knew not the sentiment of love. Such a notion, that has obtained an unaccountable belief, I shall hereafter show to be at variance with all the poetry of the Greeks--with their drama itself-- with their modes of life--and with the very elements of that human nature, which is everywhere the same. But Sophocles, in the character of Antigone, personifies duty, not pa.s.sion. It is to this, her leading individuality, that whatever might weaken the pure and statue-like effect of the creation is sacrificed. As she was to her father, so is she to her brother. The sorrows and calamities of her family have so endeared them to her heart that she has room for little else. "Formed," as she exquisitely says of herself, "to love, not to hate," [356] she lives but to devote affections the most sacred to sad and pious tasks, and the last fulfilled, she has done with earth.

When Antigone is borne away, an august personage is presented to us, whose very name to us, who usually read the Oedipus Tyrannus before the Antigone, is the foreteller of omen and doom. As in the Oedipus Tyrannus, Tiresias the soothsayer appears to announce all the terrors that ensue--so now, at the crowning desolation of that fated house, he, the solemn and mysterious surviver of such dark tragedies, is again brought upon the stage. The auguries have been evil--birds battle with each other in the air--the flame will not mount from the sacrificial victim--and the altars and hearths are full of birds and dogs, gathering to their feast on the corpse of Polynices. The soothsayer enjoins Creon not to war against the dead, and to accord the rites of burial to the prince's body. On the obstinate refusal of Creon, Tiresias utters prophetic maledictions and departs. Creon, whose vehemence of temper is combined with a feeble character, and strongly contrasts the mighty spirit of Oedipus, repents, and is persuaded by the chorus to release Antigone from her living prison, as well as to revoke the edict which denies sepulture to Polynices. He quits the stage for that purpose, and the chorus burst into one of their most picturesque odes, an Invocation to Bacchus, thus inadequately presented to the English reader.

"Oh thou, whom earth by many a t.i.tle hails, Son of the thunder-G.o.d, and wild delight Of the wild Theban maid!

Whether on far Italia's sh.o.r.es obey'd, Or where Eleusis joins thy solemn rites With the great mother's [357], in mysterious vales-- Bacchus in Bacchic Thebes best known, Thy Thebes, who claims the Thyads as her daughters; Fast by the fields with warriors dragon-sown, And where Ismenus rolls his rapid waters.

It saw thee, the smoke, On the horned height--[358]

It saw thee, and broke With a leap into light; Where roam Corycian nymphs the glorious mountain, And all melodious flows the old Castalian fountain Vocal with echoes wildly glad, The Nysian steeps with ivy clad, And sh.o.r.es with vineyards greenly blooming, Proclaiming, steep to sh.o.r.e, That Bacchus evermore Is guardian of the race, Where he holds his dwelling-place With her [359], beneath the breath Of the thunder's glowing death, In the glare of her glory consuming.

Oh now with healing steps along the slope Of loved Parna.s.sus, or in gliding motion, O'er the far-sounding deep Euboean ocean-- Come! for we perish--come!--our Lord and hope!

Leader of the stately choir Of the great stars, whose very breath is light, Who dost with hymns inspire Voices, oh youngest G.o.d, that sound by night; Come, with thy Maenad throng, Come with the maidens of thy Naxian isle, Who chant their Lord Bacchus--all the while Maddening, with mystic dance, the solemn midnight long!"

At the close of the chorus the Nuntius enters to announce the catastrophe, and Eurydice, the wife of Creon, disturbed by rumours within her palace, is made an auditor of the narration. Creon and his train, after burying Polynices, repair to the cavern in which Antigone had been immured. They hear loud wailings within "that unconsecrated chamber"--it is the voice of Haemon. Creon recoils--the attendants enter--within the cavern they behold Antigone, who, in the horror of that deathlike solitude, had strangled herself with the zone of her robe; and there was her lover lying beside, his arms clasped around her waist. Creon at length advances, perceives his son, and conjures him to come forth.

"Then, glaring on his father with wild eyes, The son stood dumb, and spat upon his face, And clutched the unnatural sword--the father fled, And, wroth, as with the arm that missed a parent, The wretched man drove home unto his breast The abhorrent steel; yet ever, while dim sense Struggled within the fast-expiring soul-- Feebler, and feebler still, his stiffening arms Clung to that virgin form--and every gasp Of his last breath with b.l.o.o.d.y dews distained The cold white cheek that was his pillow. So Lies death embracing death!" [360]

In the midst of this description, by a fine stroke of art, Euridice, the mother of Haemon, abruptly and silently quits the stage [361].

When next we hear of her, she has destroyed herself, with her last breath cursing her husband as the murderer of her child. The end of the play leaves Creon the surviver. He himself does not perish, for he himself has never excited our sympathies [362]. He is punished through his son and wife--they dead, our interest ceases in him, and to add his death to theirs and to that of Antigone would be bathos.

VIII. In the tragedy of "Electra," the character of the heroine stands out in the boldest contrast to the creation of the Antigone; both are endowed with surpa.s.sing majesty and strength of nature--they are loftier than the daughters of men, their very loveliness is of an age when G.o.ds were no distant ancestors of kings--when, as in the early sculptors of Pallas, or even of Aphrodite, something of the severe and stern was deemed necessary to the realization of the divine; and the beautiful had not lost the colossal proportions of the sublime. But the strength and heroism of Antigone is derived from love--love, sober, serene, august--but still love. Electra, on the contrary, is supported and exalted above her s.e.x by the might of her hatred. Her father, "the king of men," foully murdered in his palace --herself compelled to consort with his a.s.sa.s.sins--to receive from their hands both charity and insult--the adulterous murderer on her father's throne, and lord of her father's marriage bed [363]--her brother a wanderer and an outcast. Such are the thoughts unceasingly before her!--her heart and soul have for years fed upon the bitterness of a resentment, at once impotent and intense, and nature itself has turned to gall. She sees not in Clytemnestra a mother, but the murderess of a father. The doubt and the compunction of the modern Hamlet are unknown to her more masculine spirit. She lives on but in the hope of her brother's return and of revenge. The play opens with the appearance of Orestes, Pylades, and an old attendant--arrived at break of day at the habitation of the Pelopidae--"reeking with blood"

--the seats of Agamemnon. Orestes, who had been saved in childhood by his sister from the designs of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, has now returned in manhood. It is agreed that, in order to lull all suspicion in the royal adulterers, a false account of the death of Orestes by an accident in the Pythian Games shall be given to Clytemnestra; and Orestes and Pylades themselves are afterward to be introduced in the character of Phocians, bearing the ashes of the supposed dead. Meanwhile the two friends repair to the sepulchre of Agamemnon to offer libations, etc. Electra then appears, indulges her indignant lamentations at her lot, and consoles herself with the hope of her brother's speedy return.

She is joined by her sister Chrysothemis, who is bearing sepulchral offerings to the tomb of Agamemnon; and in this interview Sophocles, with extraordinary skill and deep knowledge of human nature, contrives to excite our admiration and sympathy for the vehement Electra by contrasting her with the weak and selfish Chrysothemis. Her very bitterness against her mother is made to a.s.sume the guise of a solemn duty to her father. Her unfeminine qualities rise into courage and magnanimity--she glories in the unkindness and persecution she meets with from Clytemnestra and Aegisthus--they are proofs of her reverence to the dead. Woman as she is, she is yet the daughter of a king--she cannot submit to a usurper--"she will not, add cowardice to misery."

Chrysothemis informs Electra that on the return of Aegisthus it is resolved to consign her to a vault "where she may chant her woes unheard." Electra learns the meditated sentence undismayed--she will not moderate her unwelcome wo--"she will not be a traitoress to those she loves." But a dream has appalled Clytemnestra--Agamemnon has appeared to her as in life. In the vision he seemed to her to fix his sceptre on the soil, whence it sprouted up into a tree that overshadowed the whole land. Disquieted and conscience-stricken, she now sends Chrysothemis with libations to appease the manes of the dead. Electra adjures Chrysothemis not to render such expiations to scatter them to the winds or on the dust--to let them not approach the resting-place of the murdered king. Chrysothemis promises to obey the injunction, and departs. A violent and powerful scene between Clytemnestra and Electra ensues, when the attendant enters (as was agreed on) to announce the death of Orestes. In this recital he portrays the ceremony of the Pythian races in lines justly celebrated, and which, as an animated and faithful picture of an exhibition so renowned, the reader may be pleased to see, even in a feeble and cold translation. Orestes had obtained five victories in the first day--in the second he starts with nine compet.i.tors in the chariot-race--an Achaean, a Spartan, two Libyans--he himself with Thessalian steeds--a sixth from Aetolia, a Magnesian, an Enian, an Athenian, and a Boeotian complete the number.

"They took their stand where the appointed judges Had cast their lots, and ranged the rival cars; Rang out the brazen trump! Away they bound, Cheer the hot steeds and shake the slackened reins As with a body the large s.p.a.ce is filled With the huge clangour of the rattling cars: High whirl aloft the dust-clouds; blent together Each presses each--and the lash rings--and loud Snort the wild steeds, and from their fiery breath, Along their manes and down the circling wheels, Scatter the flaking foam. Orestes still, Ay, as he swept around the perilous pillar Last in the course, wheel'd in the rus.h.i.+ng axle, The left rein curbed--that on the dexter hand Flung loose. So on erect the chariots rolled!

Sudden the Aenian's fierce and headlong steeds Broke from the bit--and, as the seventh time now The course was circled, on the Libyan car Dash'd their wild fronts: then order changed to ruin: Car crashed on car--the wide Crissaean plain Was, sealike, strewn with wrecks: the Athenian saw, Slackened his speed, and, wheeling round the marge, Unscathed and skilful, in the midmost s.p.a.ce, Left the wild tumult of that tossing storm.

Behind, Orestes, hitherto the last, Had yet kept back his coursers for the close; Now one sole rival left--on, on he flew, And the sharp sound of the impelling scourge Rang in the keen ears of the flying steeds.

He nears--he reaches--they are side by side Now one--the other--by a length the victor.

The courses all are past--the wheels erect All safe--when as the hurrying coursers round The fatal pillar dash'd, the wretched boy Slackened the left rein; on the column's edge Crash'd the frail axle--headlong from the car, Caught and all meshed within the reins he fell; And masterless, the mad steeds raged along!

Loud from that mighty mult.i.tude arose A shriek--a shout! But yesterday such deeds To-day such doom! Now whirled upon the earth, Now his limbs dash'd aloft, they dragged him--those Wild horses--till all gory from the wheels Released--and no man, not his nearest friends, Could in that mangled corpse have traced Orestes.

They laid the body on the funeral pyre, And while we speak, the Phocian strangers bear, In a small, brazen, melancholy urn, That handful of cold ashes to which all The grandeur of the beautiful hath shrunk.

Hither they bear him--in his father's land To find that heritage--a tomb!"

It is much to be regretted that this pa.s.sage, so fine in the original, is liable to one great objection--it has no interest as connected with the play, because the audience know that Orestes is not dead; and though the description of the race retains its animation, the report of the catastrophe loses the terror of reality, and appears but a highly-coloured and elaborate falsehood.

The reader will conceive the lamentations of Electra and the fearful joy of Clytemnestra at a narrative by which the one appears to lose a brother and a friend--the other a son and an avenging foe.

Chrysothemis joyfully returns to announce, that by the tomb of Agamemnon she discovers a lock of hair; libations yet moisten the summit of the mound, and flowers of every hue are scattered over the grave. "These," she thinks, "are signs that Orestes is returned."

Electra, informing her of the fatal news, proposes that they, women as they are, shall attempt the terrible revenge which their brother can no longer execute. When Chrysothemis recoils and refuses, Electra still nurses the fell design. The poet has more than once, and now again with judgment, made us sensible of the mature years of Electra [364]; she is no pa.s.sionate, wavering, and inexperienced girl, but the eldest born of the house; the guardian of the childhood of its male heir; unwedded and unloving, no soft matron cares, no tender maiden affections, have unbent the nerves of her stern, fiery, and concentrated soul. Year after year has rolled on to sharpen her hatred--to disgust her with the present--to root her to one b.l.o.o.d.y memory of the past--to sour and freeze up the gentle thoughts of womanhood--to uns.e.x

"And fill her from the crown to the toe, topful Of direst cruelty--make thick her blood Stop up the access and pa.s.sage to remorse," [365]

and fit her for one crowning deed, for which alone the daughter of the king of men lives on.

At length the pretended Phocians enter, bearing the supposed ashes of Orestes; the chief of the train addresses himself to Electra, and this is the most dramatic and touching scene in the whole tragedy. When the urn containing, as she believes, the dust of her brother, is placed in the hands of Electra, we can well overleap time and s.p.a.ce, and see before us the great actor who brought the relics of his own son upon the stage, and shed no mimic sorrows [366]--we can well picture the emotions that circle round the vast audience--pity itself being mingled with the consciousness to which the audience alone are admitted, that lamentation will soon be replaced by joy, and that the living Orestes is before his sister. It is by a most subtle and delicate art that Sophocles permits this struggle between present pain and antic.i.p.ated pleasure, and carries on the pa.s.sion of the spectators to wait breathlessly the moment when Orestes shall be discovered. We now perceive why the poet at once, in the opening of the play, announced to us the existence and return of Orestes--why he disdained the vulgar source of interest, the gross suspense we should have felt, if we had shared the ignorance of Electra, and not been admitted to the secret we impatiently long to be communicated to her. In this scene, our superiority to Electra, in the knowledge we possess, refines and softens our compa.s.sion, blending it with hope. And most beautifully here does Sophocles remove far from us the thought of the hard hatred that hitherto animates the mourner--the strong, proud spirit is melted away--the woman and the sister alone appear. He whom she had loved more dearly than a mother--whom she had nursed, and saved, and prayed for, is "a nothing" in her hands; and the last rites it had not been hers to pay. He had been

"By strangers honoured and by strangers mourned."

All things had vanished with him--"vanished in a day"--"vanished as by a hurricane"--she is left with her foes alone. "Admit me" (she cries), "to thy refuge--make room for me in thy home."

In these lamentations, the cold, cla.s.sic drama seems to warm into actual life. Art, exquisite because invisible, unites us at once with imperishable nature--we are no longer delighted with Poetry--we are weeping with Truth.