Euripides (Mahaffy)/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
DRAMAS OF CHARACTER AND OF SITUATION—THE CYCLOPS.
47. We only have two plays remaining which can strictly be called character plays—that is to say plays in which the whole interest centres on the study of a single or very few personages, as is commonly the case in the plays of Sophocles. And these two plays chance to be plays in which the passion of love is the phase of humanity specially brought out. We know that this side of human nature, especially in the female sex, was a favourite study with Euripides, and exposed him to special censure from many critics. But there is no reason to believe that he did not compose character plays in which the intellectual or ethical side was predominant. Such were apparently the Philoctetes, in which Ulysses played the part of a large and wise statesman, and the Melanippe, in which the intellectual side was so predominant as to give a title (ἡ σόφη, the wise), to the play. And, indeed, in extant plays there is no want of splendid ethical character drawing. Still the criticism is probably true, that even in such cases the intellectual side occupied our poet too exclusively, and that owing to this peculiarity none of his men (except perhaps the boy Ion) have taken a permanent place in literature. For while the portraiture of intellect may be interesting, nothing will speak to the heart of every age except moral excellence.
48. But in our two essentially character plays, the Medea and the Hippolytus, we have the passions of female jealousy and of unlawful love—each resulting in terrible revenge—drawn in imperishable colours. Though succeeding ages have equally praised and imitated them, the judgment of the Athenians, I think rightly, preferred the Hippolytus.
The Medea came out in 431 B.C., with the Philoctetes, Dictys, and the early-lost satyric Θερισταί, or Reapers. It is said to have been anticipated, as to subject, by a play of Neophron, a contemporary but now unknown tragic poet. Like many other great literary works, it was at first a failure, as it only gained the third prize, Euphorion (son of Æschylus) obtaining the first prize, Sophocles the second. To obtain the third prize was considered a disgrace, for even if more than three poets ever contended (which I think doubtful) nothing lower than the third place is ever mentioned. Accordingly the Medea was a failure, and this is justified by the criticisms upon it, which are still extant in the Poetics of Aristotle, who blames the poet for the introduction of king Ægeus, and for the fabulous device of the winged chariot at the conclusion of the play. Possibly some of its original defects have disappeared from our texts, for there is considerable evidence that there was a second edition, and many of the variants or supposed interpolations in our texts may arise from the two editions being imperfectly fused by a later hand. But apart from Aristotle's objections, any modern critic might bring this charge against the Medea, that the whole interest turns upon the delineation of the furious passion of Medea, and her devices to punish those who have offended her. For the other characters are either mean or colourless, if we except the two aged and faithful servants, the nurse and pedagogue, whose prologue and dialogue admirably introduce the play. Jason, the faithless husband, is a sort of Greek Æneas, who endeavours to justify his desertion of his wife by specious excuses, and has not even, like Virgil's hero, the excuse of a warning voice from the gods to urge him in the direction of his inclinations. The chorus, which consists of Corinthian women, also comes under the censure of the critics, inasmuch as it coolly receives the confidences of Medea, and sees a terrible plot formed and carried out against the king of the land, without offering any resistance or objection. The famous ode (vv. 824–845) on the glories of Athens, is really irrelevant in its place, being merely suggested by the fact that the Athenian Ægeus has undertaken to harbour a sorceress and wholesale murderess in his city. It is this very episode of Ægeus, who is introduced in order that the omnipotent sorceress, with her winged chariot, may not be a homeless outcast, which Aristotle censures in his Poetics. It is an otiose excrescence in the play, not without offensive details. There is no interest in the characters of the unfortunate king of Corinth and his daughter, who perish by the poisoned robe.
Thus if this play be strictly judged as a play, in which all the characters should have some interest, and contribute to the development, in which moreover good and evil should be balanced, so as to excite pity as well as terror, we must endorse the verdict of the Athenian audience. It must also be remembered, that in the days of the production of these great tragedies, as in other ages of great production, acting was not a developed and lucrative profession, so that although Euripides had his favourite actor, and no longer appeared, like older poets, on the stage, the impersonation of character and of passion had not yet become a study and an art. But in the next generation, when poetic genius had died away, actors became of importance, people began to frequent the theatre, not to see a great play, but a great actor, and then it was that the Medea sprang at once from the third to the first place as an acting piece. For one actor was sufficient to bring out all the power of the play, and nowhere could a great actor find a more grateful subject for his genius than the impersonation of the vehement character and furious passion of the great Colchian princess. This is the figure which has also fascinated the great majority of later critics, who like every public seem to miss finer points, and appreciate the strong outlines of ungovernable passion. We do not know whether the Trachiniæ of Sophocles was an earlier or a later play, but it affords so curious and interesting a contrast to the Medea, that I venture to suppose Sophocles consciously painted a more natural and womanly picture of the sorrows of a deserted wife, who, without the power or wickedness of Medea, still destroys her deceiver, and brings ruin upon herself, in spite of her patience and long-suffering. The external resemblance of the two plays, the foreign residence of both heroines, the pretended contentment of both in order to attain their ends, the poisoned robe of both, is very striking. Yet the Trachiniæ, in my opinion a finer play, with far more interest in the characters, has held no place in public favour beside the stronger and more violent Medea. In every respect her part is a great acting part, from her wild exclamations behind the scenes in the beginning all through her pleading with Jason, her affected calmness, up to her wild burst of joy when she has secured the help of Ægeus.
But had even all these features been commonplace, there was one scene sufficient not only to save, but to immortalise, the play. The mental conflict between the mother's affection for her children and her stern resolve to sacrifice them as a revenge upon her husband—this scene (vv. 1021–1080)—in which fury and compassion alternate, and tears of tenderness dim the eyes flashing with ungovernable rage—has laid hold of the world as one of the great portraits of human nature which never can grow old.[1] It is remarkable that the poet has chosen iambics and not agitated lyric measures, for this immortal scene. I attribute this either to its early date among his plays, when he had not developed his fancy for lyrical monodies, or perhaps better to the nature of the scene, which requires frequent and long pauses in the acting.
We actually hear of six Greek Medeas, besides the early play of Neophron, not to speak of comic parodies, so powerfully did the subject lay hold of the Attic public. Ennius imitated the play in a free Latin version, and both Cicero and Brutus are said to have been reading or citing it, in their last moments—no mean distinction for any tragedy. Horace often alludes to it, and Ovid's earliest work was a Medea, also a free version, which was acted on the Roman stage with applause, when its author was pining in exile, and which is praised by Tacitus and Quintilian. There remains to us, however, a tragedy of this name under the title of Seneca. Anyone who will consult this piece will see how completely the taste of the Roman poet had altered and depraved the great conception of Euripides. The gloomy horrors of Medea's witchcraft are the great feature in this bombastic production.
49. The Hippolytus, a second and improved edition, we are told, of the poet's former treatment of the same subject,[2] which obtained the first prize in 428 B.C., is of greater merit and interest. For here the passion of Phædra is brought into contrast with the perfect purity and steel-cold passionlessness of Hippolytus—a sort of princely and conscious Ion. Nothing can be more unfair than the estimate of Phædra's character by adverse ancient and admiring modern critics; for we must remember that her fatal passion was a heaven-sent malady, against which she struggled with all the force of her nature, and which she proposed to escape by death had not her secret been extracted from her, and had she not then been seduced by the complaisance and want of principle of her aged nurse. The Greeks believed in the direct interference of the goddess Aphrodite, and on no phase of human nature is their poetry more copious and more striking than on her absolute power to instil the best minds with wild madness.[3] Phædra is therefore in no sense an abandoned woman, or a low character ceding to her ordinary passions, as a modern reader might at first sight suppose, but a noble and pure woman afflicted with a horrible madness, over which she in vain strives to obtain control. What is, however, though equally Greek, not so reconcilable with our ideas of a noble nature, is her dying vengeance by bequeathing to her husband a false accusation against Hippolytus. Euripides no doubt found it in the legend, and to him, and to his age, the taking of vengeance on an enemy by treacherous means was not only natural but lawful. To us it is not so, and hence modern copies of the play have commonly softened or altered this feature.
It is to be observed that nowhere does Euripides conceive a man afflicted with such a visitation, which would, I fancy, have seemed quite unnatural or absurd to an Athenian audience. Furthermore, this great painter of the passion of love never dreamt of composing a love-scene, which would probably have been considered indelicate. So different are the tastes of equally civilised societies! The nearest approach to such a scene is the recognition of Menelaus and Helen (in the Helena), where a long-separated husband and wife meet and embrace with transports of joy. Such a love-scene in a modern play—say at the court of Louis XIV.—would have excited transports of merriment or else of impatience. Before a Periclean audience it was the only open manifestation of affection between the sexes which had hitherto been tolerated; nor did Euripides here attempt the innovation which modern society has carried through so completely in all forms of the drama.
The fate of Hippolytus is indeed tragic—a lofty and pure character destroyed by his own purity; but the spectator is partly reconciled to it, and the vengeance of the deity is palliated, by the bold and somewhat impious contempt for her which he expresses at the opening of the play. The aged servant who begs him to offer the customary sacrifice to Aphrodite, and not brave her anger, touches the proper string; the bold self-opinion of the hero gives a jarring sound.
Moreover the vengeance of the goddess, who is drawn in the most repulsive colours, seems to express the retaliation of nature upon those who violate her decrees, for asceticism was not honoured by the Greeks, who even in their tragedies are never weary of recommending a moderate share in the delights of love. But in addition to this larger conception, the spite of Aphrodite, as well as the weakness of Artemis, who is the hero's patron goddess, does seem intended by the poet to lower the respect for these deities in the public mind. It is indeed a reductio ad absurdum of Divine Providence, when the most awful misfortunes of men are ascribed to the malice of hostile, and the impotence of friendly, deities. And even Artemis, when powerless to save her favourite, threatens (v. 920) that she will be avenged by slaying with her arrows some favourite of Aphrodite. Euripides can hardly have assigned to goddesses these miserable parts, without intending to satirise the popular creed, and to open the way for higher and better notions.
The chorus is a weak and sometimes inconvenient spectator of the action—the necessary consequence of its being present all through the play, and therefore rather a general defect in Greek plays, than a fault in Euripides. But nothing will show more closely the sort of criticism to which Euripides has been subjected, in both ancient and modern times, than the general outcry against the celebrated line uttered by Hippolytus (v. 612), ἡ γλῶσσ᾽ ὀμώμοχ᾽, ἡ δὲ φρὴν ἀνωμοτός, "my tongue has sworn, but my mind is free." He cries out this in his fury, when the old nurse, who had bound him over to secrecy by an oath, adjures him not to betray her mistress. It seems indeed hard that a dramatic poet should have his moral character decided by the excited utterances of his characters, but it is worse than hard, it is scandalously unjust, that these critics should not have noted that some fifty lines further on, the same Hippolytus declares (v. 657) that were he not bound by the sanctity of his oath, he would certainly inform Theseus. Can there possibly be a greater case of immorality in criticism?
The metrical treatment of the dramatic scenes in this play is much richer and more various than what we find in the Medea, More especially the alternating of feverish dochmiacs with iambics is twice used with striking effect. In the first the chorus, who cannot hear Hippolytus behind the scenes, inquire in great agitation from Phædra, who stands at the door on the stage, and who replies with the calmness of despair. In the second, the lament of Theseus over Phædra's body is written in iambic and dochmiac couplets alternately, thus conveying the changing colours of his deep and perplexed sorrow (vv. 817 sqq.). This scene has been admirably restored to its proper form in Weil's edition.
50. Beyond these two, there are no strictly character dramas of Euripides preserved; his treatment of human nature in other plays which contain remarkable heroes and heroines, will occupy us in a subsequent chapter.
We now come to that largest and most various class of plays, which I have called dramas of situation, and which consist in successions of scenes, brought together with less connection than that of a proper plot, for the purpose of producing affecting pictures of human sorrow or awful pictures of the tyranny of fate. The line of demarcation between these and the dramas of plot is of course not very clear, and opinions may vary as to the classing of particular plays. But as no fair critic would claim for the Supplices of Æschylus any proper plot, so it is certain that this oldest and simplest form of "δρᾶμα" in which nothing was done, was revived by Euripides for the purpose of stringing together pathetic scenes and musical effects, without elaborating an ingenious and complicated story.
51. His Supplices, mainly intended as an encomium of Athens in the person of Theseus, turns on the rescuing of the bodies of the "Seven against Thebes" who had fallen before its gates, and were lying unburied. The woes of the bereaved suppliants, and the despair and suicide of Evadne, Capaneus' widow, alternate with political discussions between the Theban herald and Theseus in affording the matter for the play. The date is uncertain, probably about 420 B.C., shortly after the battle of Delium, and it was probably not far removed in production from the Heracleidæ, of which the plan is very similar, though the polities are widely different—the one supporting Argos, and the other very hostile to it. Nay, in the Supplices alliance and eternal friendship with Argos are solemnly inculcated. Now if it indeed be true that these two plays were produced within a short interval of time, during the shifting interests and alliances in the later part of the Peloponnesian war, it will prove how completely Euripides regarded those pieces as temporary political advices, varying with the situation, and of which the inconsistences were not more important than those in a volume of any statesman's political speeches. I think moreover that in the general discussion (between Theseus and the Theban herald) on monarchy, democracy, and general statecraft, which stops the action of the play, we may clearly perceive a growing tendency in tragedy to become a written record, and to appeal to a reading public, beyond the listening crowd in the theatre. Euripides is in this play so conscious of the dramatic impropriety, that he makes Theseus comment on the volubility of the herald in matters not concerning him, and wonder at his own patience in replying to him. It is therefore plain that what are called rhetorical redundancies in this and other of Euripides' plays are deliberately chosen by the poet as subservient to an important purpose—that of the political education of the people from his own point of view.
52. The Heracleidæ.—These general remarks apply to the Heracleidæ, in which the children of Heracles come as suppliants to Demophon, king of Athens, and are defended by Athens, this time against Argive insolence, and with the aid of the splendid sacrifice of Macaria, one of the fugitives. But this heroine only comes in for one act of the play, which is not concluded with her death.
Although Euripides seems here again to have used his stage as a political platform, but a platform (like the modern pulpit) on which an immediate reply is impossible, he combined, along with this main idea, a great many beautiful and affecting situations, and it may be said that for tragic interest none of his plays exceed its first part, ending, unfortunately, with a huge gap after the 629th line. Many critics have censured it in ignorance of this capital fact, and also of some lesser mutilations near the end. Indeed several ancient quotations from the play are not in our present texts, and it is the merit of Kirchhoff to have first insisted upon these difficulties, and to have critically edited the text of the play in his edition of the works of Euripides.
As this is one of the less known plays, I will briefly rehearse the argument. The play opens with the altercation between the violent and brutal Argive herald, Copreus (who, very unlike the cultivated herald of the Supplices, is to be compared to the Egyptian herald in Æschylus' Supplices) and the faithful Iolaus, who in extreme age and decrepitude endeavours as best he can to protect the children of his old comrade in arms. It is indeed curious how often the tragedians ascribe an overbearing and brutal bullying to heralds, a feature never found in Homer, and indeed wholly inconsistent with their duties. The chorus interferes, and presently Demophon, king of Athens, appears, and dismisses the herald, not without personal threats of violence. The poet evidently had before him another version of the legend, in which the herald was slain by the Athenians. But when Demophon has duly undertaken the task of protecting the fugitives, Hie prophets tell him that a noble virgin must be sacrificed to insure him the victory. This dreadful news leads to a pathetic outburst of despair in Iolaus, who sees himself again driven from a place of refuge, and wandering with his helpless charge, owing to the hard conditions imposed on his protectors. But the old man's idle offers of his own life are interrupted by the entrance of Macaria, one of the fugitive children, who, when she hears the oracle, calmly offers her own life. I shall speak in another chapter of the drawing of her character in comparison with other heroines in Euripides' plays. Unfortunately the narrative of her sacrifice is lost.
The interest of the spectator is then transferred to the approaching battle, and the warlike energy of the decrepit Iolaus, who insists on going to the battle; and as the putting on of armour would doubtless have been impossible to an actor stuffed out in the tragic costume, the messenger, a servant of Hyllus, discreetly offers to carry it for him to the field. The manifestly comic drawing of Iolaus in this scene seems to me as possibly a satire on some effete Athenian general, who undertook active duty when unfit for it. But by a miracle, which is presently narrated by a messenger, he recovers his youth, and with Hyllus, defeats and captures Eurystheus, his persecutor. The mutilated concluding scene raises another discussion, not of legendary but of then pressing interest—the fate of prisoners taken in battle. Alcmene, with the ferocity which Euripides generally paints old women, demands his instant death. The chorus insist that by the laws of Hellenic warfare an adversary not killed in battle cannot be afterwards slain without impiety. Eurystheus, however, seems to facilitate in some strange way the removal of these scruples by prophesying that his tomb will yet serve Athens against her enemies, a prophecy similar to that in the Œdipus at Colonus of Sophocles, with which the present play has many features in common, The actual decision of the dispute is lost.
53. The Hecuba.—Very much the same plan is I followed in the Hecuba, which consists of a series of the sorrows of the Trojan queen, and in which the opening subject, the sacrifice of Polyxena, concludes in the middle of the play, artfully introducing a new catastrophe—the finding of the body of Polydorus, and Hecuba's vengeance upon his false Thracian host Except that the ghost of Polydorus foretells this combination of subjects in the prologue, they have no connection, save as common sorrows of Hecuba.
The Hecuba seems to have been brought out about 425 B.C., and is an earlier treatment of the sorrows of the Trojan queen than the Troades, which came out eight or nine years later, and is conceived in a different style. The former has always been a favourite play, has been often imitated, and since Erasmus' time, used as a schoolbook. It is by no means so full of political allusion as the plays we have just noticed, but is perhaps for that very reason a better tragedy. It treats of the climax of Hecuba's misfortunes—the sacrifice of Polyxena at the grave of Achilles, and the murder of Polydorus, her brother, by Polymestor, his Thracian host. The chorus of Trojan women sing odes of great beauty, especially that describing the capture of Ilium (vv. 905 sqq.). The pleading of Hecuba with Odysseus, who comes to carry off her daughter, is full of pathos, and the conduct of Polyxena places her among Euripides' leading heroines. But in this play we have the narrative of the sacrifice complete, and this concludes the former part. The passage into the later part, which is not really connected as to plot, is well devised by the circumstance that a slave going to fetch water for the funeral rites of Polyxena, finds the body of Polydorus tossing on the beach—an event announced in the prologue by the ghost of Polydorus. This brings out the fierce element in the heartbroken queen. She debates, in an aside not common on the Greek stage, whether she will appeal to Agamemnon, who is present, to aid her in her vengeance, and she ultimately does so with great art, if not with dignity. She then carries out her plot of slaying the Thracian king's children, and putting out his eyes, with great fierceness. The wild lamentations of the barbarian, Agamemnon's cool refusal to support him, and his gloomy prophecies, conclude the play. The change in Hecuba, when there is nothing more to plead for, from despair to savage fury, is finely conceived. She has been compared to the Margaret of Shakspere's Richard III. The play became a favourite at Rome, Ennius translated it, and it is cited by Cicero and Horace, not to speak of the many suggestions derived from it by Virgil. It was done into French and into Italian early in the sixteenth century, and was brought on the English stage in 1726.
54. The Troades.—This "heroine of situation" occupies a leading part in another play, the Troades, which is nothing but a picture of the miseries of the captives during their last day within sight of their ruined city. The episode of Polyxena, which is mentioned as already past, is here compensated by the more tragic fate of Cassandra (whose prophetic wildness supplies a splendid scene), and that of Andromache. Indeed the misfortunes of the latter—the murder of her child Astyanax while she is hurried away, so that the aged queen Hecuba is left alone to lament and bury him—are almost too heartrending to be truly tragic, and may be regarded as the highest point of pathos ever reached by this most pathetic of poets.
The play was brought out in 415 B.C., as the third play with the Alexander (Paris) and Palamedes; it was followed by the Sisyphus, as a satyric piece. But it only obtained second prize, the first being awarded to a tetralogy of Xenocles on the Theban legends of Œdipus and Pentheus. While varying the incidents of the Hecuba, the poet here introduces a larger number of characters, both Cassandra and Andromache appearing. There is, however, far less plot than there is in the Hecuba, and except for the curious anticipation in the opening dialogue of Athene and Poseidon, we miss even the satisfaction of revenge taken by the Trojan queen in the earlier play. It is indeed nothing but "a voice in Pamah, and lamentation—Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they were not." It is like the prophet's roll, which is written within and without with mourning, and lamentation, and woe. Nevertheless there are passages in the wild and poetic fervour of Cassandra which remind us of her great scene in the Agamemnon of Æschylus. There is, moreover, a litigious scene, in which Hecuba and Helen argue before Menelaus. This, together with the repeated appearances of the herald Talthybius, are to us no agreeable diversions. The chief indication of Euripides' later style in this play is the prominence of monodies, or soliloquies of complaint with musical accompaniments. In these our poet excels, and in spite of the ridicule of Aristophanes, they are the finest passages in this and other plays.
Most of the imitations of this play have combined with it scenes from the Hecuba, by the process called contaminatio, which was so common in Latin borrowings from the Greek stage. Two passages in Virgil's Æneid, the appeal of Juno to Aeolus, and the awful picture of the fall of Troy, are borrowed from the opening and the close of the Troades. Among the plays of Seneca, the Troades is undoubtedly the finest, but its merits are attained not only by borrowing beauties from the Hecuba, but by the introduction of a splendid scene, which we cannot identify in any Greek model. It is the scene in which Odysseus comes to seek Astyanax, whom his mother has concealed in Hector's tomb. When she protests that he is "among the dead," Odysseus orders the tomb to be desecrated, and the bones of Hector scattered to the winds. This leads to a great tragic conflict in Andromache's mind and the ultimate surrender of the child. It is probably the general cioncidence of subject with the great epics of Homer and Virgil, which has made these two plays so popular among all the imitators of the classical tragedy.
55. The Phœnissæ.—The drama most crowded in this loose way with characters and with incidents is the Phœnissæ, where all the tragic events of the great war against the Seven, and the family disasters of the house of Laius, pass before us like the visions of Macbeth—a great procession rather than the connected scenes of a single plot. We cannot even say, as in the Hecuba, that the play divides itself into two; and so, as it were, ends to begin again.
The exact date and the companion plays are uncertain, and variously stated, but it seems, according to the best evidence, to have obtained second prize at some time during the ninety-third Olympiad. It is really a tragedy on the wars of the house of Labdacus, but is called after its chorus, which is composed of Phœnician maidens on their way to Delphi, who stopped on their way through Thebes, and were thus accidentally detained in the siege by the seven chiefs. Nevertheless there would be some difficulty in giving the play any other name, for like the Troades it is strictly an episodic play, a series of pictures, all connected with the miseries of Œdipus' family, but without one central figure among the nine characters which successively appear. The name Thebais, given to it in modern imitations naturally suggests an epic poem, and not a tragedy. Perhaps Jocasta, the mother of the hostile brothers, is the most prominent personage, but yet her death is only a sort of appendix to the sacrifice of Creon's son, Menœkeus, and to the mutual slaughter of the brothers. All the scenes of the play, though thus loosely connected, are full of pathos and beauty, and hence no play of Euripides has been more frequently copied or quoted. The conception of the two brothers is very fine, Polynices, who is the exile and the assailant, being the softer character, and relenting in his hate at the moment of his death. Eteocles, on the contrary, who is on the patriotic and popular side of defending Thebes from foreign attack, is drawn a hard and cruel despot, who defends his case by the bold assertion that he now holds the throne, that none but a fool would resign so great a prize, and who dies in silence.
Antigone is introduced near the opening of the play for the sake of the celebrated scene on the walls, when her old attendant slave (παιδαγωγός) whom Dolce calls a Bailo, and Schiller a Hofmeister, shows her the various chiefs. This scene, of which the earliest form is the discourse between Helen and Priam on the walls of Troy (in the third book of the Iliad), has often since been copied in various literature. The critics quote instances from the Latin poet Statius (in his Thebaid), from Tasso, from the Persian Firdusi (wherever he found it), and in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. The princess reappears at the close of the play, with a character combining the features of her two portraits in Sophocles' Antigone and second Œdipus. The most dramatic part of the play is the dialogue between the brothers, and Jocasta's efforts to reconcile them, followed by the narrative of their death.
If the choral odes, which are very elegant, do not aid the action, but are rather calm contemplations of the mythical history of Thebes, Euripides would doubtless defend himself by pleading that he had intentionally assigned them to a body of foreign maidens who could only feel a general interest in the fortunes of the actors. The crowding of incident was doubtless intended as a contrast to Æschylus' Seven against Thebes, which with all its unity of purpose and martial fire, is wanting in dramatic interest. Indeed, the long description of the seven chiefs in that play is directly criticised by Euripides (vv. 751–752) as undramatic. Racine's Thébaïde ou les Frères Ennemis is the most famous modern version, but was an early play, with defects for which the poet himself apologises. But both Racine, and Alfieri (in his Polinice), make divers changes in the character drawing, which are not improvements on the great original. Schiller has not only given an excellent literal version of part of the play, but has copied several scenes in his Braut von Messina.
56. The Andromache.—We find a combination of two distinct subjects in two other plays; one perhaps the poorest, and the other among the best of the poet's works. The former, the Andromache, is, like the Supplices, occasional in its political complexion, being a bitter attack on Spartan honour and morals in the persons of Hermione and Menelaus. But Andromache is the bond uniting the two parts of the play, which re-opens with the appearance of Orestes and the flight of Hermione.
The date of the play is uncertain, as we are told it was not brought out at Athens, perhaps only after the poet's death. The bitter allusions to Sparta would suit any time in the Peloponnesian war. It has, indeed, quite the complexion of a political pamphlet written under the guise of a tragedy. Andromache, who is now the slave and concubine of Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, appears as a suppliant, telling her tale and mourning her woes in elegiac lament. Her protector is absent, and she is being persecuted by Hermione, the lawful wife of Neoptolemus, and her father Menelaus, who wish to slay her child. She is persuaded to leave the altar to which she had fled, by threats that her child will be at once put to death, and when she does, Menelaus breaks his word and sends them both to execution. The pathetic laments of mother and child are interrupted by the sudden advent of the aged Peleus, who protects them stoutly, in a long altercation with Menelaus. But then, without any sufficient reason, Hermione comes in agitated at the vengeance which her husband will take when he hears of her doings, and her paroxysms are only allayed by the arrival of Orestes, with whom she arranges to fly. Then follows a long messenger's narrative how her former husband has been slain at Delphi by the arts of Orestes. The lamentations of Peleus conclude the play.
Though justly called a second-rate play by the scholiasts, it was popular enough to be quoted at Alexander's table by Cleitus on the undue share of glory obtained by the general of an army (vv. 639 sqq.)—a quotation which cost him his life at the hands of the intoxicated monarch. It was evidently in Virgil's mind when composing his fifth Æneid, but the Andromaque of Racine is considerably altered, as the relations of the heroine to Neoptolemus are not suited to the modern stage, nor could such a character be treated with tragic dignity nowadays.
57. The Mad Heracles.—The other specimen is the Hercules Furens, which every English reader can now study in Mr. Browning's admirable version (in his Aristophanes' Apology), and which is so striking in its combination of two subjects that it almost deserves to be called a drama of plot. The action opens with the hopeless condition of Heracles' children and their imminent death at the hands of the tyrant Lycus. The hero, returning from Hades, actually intercepts them on their way to execution, and amid the congratulations of the chorus, and the just vengeance on Lycus, the play seems (like Mendelssohn's overture to the Midsummer Night's Dream) to conclude. But as the chorus are singing their ode of feasting and joy, the figure of Madness (Lytta) appears aloft, sent forth to destroy the hero's newly-recovered happiness. Then follows the dreadful narrative of his massacre of his wife and children, and his attempted wrecking of the house. His re-appearance, lying in deathlike sleep and in bonds under the watch of his heartbroken father, his gradual awakening to sanity and his despair, are the subjects of the magnificent scenes which follow. But instead of ending his sorrows and hiding his shame by voluntary death, like the Ajax of Sophocles, he is saved from himself and carried away to Athens by his trusty friend Theseus, a noble and natural substitute for the somewhat vulgar deus ex machinâ of other dramas. I shall speak again, in a future chapter, of the treatment of Heracles' character in this noble play. But with all its merits it is, after all, a mere series of scenes showing rapid reverses of fortune, of which the latter are not the natural or necessary product of the former. Heracles is afflicted with his madness through the hate of Hera, not (as some would have it) on account of his vengeance upon Lycus being planned with treachery, for this was to the Greeks no crime, no meanness, but a lawful and laudable act.
58. The Bacchæ.—I have left for the last the famous Bacchæ, which is indeed constructed on a proper plan, and admits no disturbing episodes, but in which the main interest lies nevertheless not in the plot, not in the character of Pentheus, but in the striking situations brought before us, the contrast of the angry powerless king and the smiling almighty Dionysus, the wild delights of the Mænad women in the mountains, the grotesque figure of the disguised Pentheus in the lofty pine-top, then the horror of their bloody triumph as they display his mangled limbs, and lastly the awakening and despair of Agave. All these subjects are well and thoroughly connected, yet more splendid in themselves than in their connection.
The play was composed for the court of Archelaus. Instead of dealing with mere human passion or human character, the poet passes for once into the field of the marvellous and the supernatural, and builds his drama on the subject of the introduction of a new faith, and the awful punishment of the sceptical Pentheus, who jeers at the worship of Dionysus, and endeavours to put it down by force. His mother, Agave, and his sisters, are driven into Mount Kithæron, where they celebrate the wild orgies of the god with many attendant miracles, Pentheus, who at first attempts to imprison the incarnate god, and then to put down the Bacchanals by force of arms, is deprived of reason by Dionysus. He is then made ridiculous by being dressed as a woman, and led out by the god to the mountain, where he is caught watching the Mænads from the top of a pine-tree on which Dionysus had placed him, and torn to pieces by the women of his own family. The lament of Agave, when she comes in with the bleeding head, which she had mistaken in her frenzy for a lion's, but recognises with returning sense, is now lost. But its main features can be restored from the rhetor Apsines, and from the corresponding passage in the religious drama called Christus Patiens, ascribed to Gregory of Nazianzen. For this play follows the Bacchæ closely, being little more than a cento from it. Hence, Dean Milman, in his admirable translation of the Bacchæ, has inserted the lament from the Christian play. The chorus does not consist of the furious Theban Mænads, but of Asiatic attendants on the god, who sing in splendid hymns the joys and blessings of the new faith. It is of course undramatic, that Pentheus, who is proceeding so violently against the votaries of the new religion, should leave this chorus to sing its dithyrambs in peace; but ordinary possibilities must often be violated for such a stage difficulty as an ever-present chorus.
The general tenor of the play, which perhaps contains the poet's latest reflections on human life, is that of acquiescence in the received faith, or in a well-attested faith, without sceptical doubts and questionings. But it is remarkable that where the struggle is about a new cult, the old men of the play, Cadmus and Teiresias, are the only persons ready to embrace strange and violent rites, in the performance of which they even make themselves ridiculous. It is not impossible that among the half-educated Macedonian youth, with whom literature was coming into fashion, the poet may have met a good deal of that insolent second-hand scepticism which is so offensive to a deep and serious thinker, and he may have wished to show them that he was not, as they doubtless hailed him, the apostle of this random speculative arrogance.
59. This kind of play then—an episode, or a number of episodes from a legend—was most properly introduced by a prologue, bringing the story up to the moment when the action began. It was almost as often concluded by the appearance of a deity, who calmed the disputes, or when the excitement of deep passions did not admit of any prompt and peaceful solution, assured the requital of the actors. But I here only indicate what will be again treated when we come to speak of the lesser features of the tragedies. It seems from the quotations of the ancients as well as from the imitations of moderns, that this was not the highest and most successful class of Euripides' plays; and it has, moreover, lost far more than the rest by the impossibility of reproducing the musical effects, which must have been a capital feature in the lyrical expressions of lamentation or wild excitement. The tendency of the modern drama is foreign to such simple construction without prominence either of intrigue or character. We may nevertheless find specimens, not only in the Italian opera, which perhaps best represents them, but in such plays as Wallenstein's Lager of Schiller, a play to which the spurious Rhesus of Euripides bears some resemblance.
60. The Cyclops.—I can find no fitter place than this to say a word about the Cyclops, which is exceptionally interesting as the only extant relic of the satyric drama, in which Æschylus and Pratinas were very famous. With Euripides this kind of play was unusual—he only composed eight of them, but as each tetralogy was supposed to conclude with one, he substituted short plays of a melodramatic character, like the Alcestis. The seriousness of the poet's face and the sadness of his other poetry might have led us to infer that the quality of humour was denied him, and that a joke from Euripides would have been a strained and unnatural phenomenon. Yet, as it were for the purpose of upsetting all such theories, it is from him alone that one of these peculiar farces is preserved; in which there is a real fund of mirth, and which, but for the coarseness of some of the jokes, would make a good acting play on a modern stage.[4]
The ancients carefully distinguished satyric dramas, always written by tragic poets, from comedies, which comic poets wrote; and the distinction, when closely examined, turns out to be something like the modern contrast between comedy and pantomime. In our pantomimes some well-known fairy-tale is represented by actors, who take no part in the buffoonery and the irrelevancies of a tolerably fixed and conventional group of figures with which they are surrounded. Thus, while the subject of the play or extravaganza varies, these accessories—the clown, pantaloon, columbine, and even the policeman—re-appear as fixed elements. Now this was precisely what occurred in the satyric drama so far as the Cyclops and other lesser evidence can warrant. The adventures of Odysseus and his companions with the atheist monster,[5] Polyphemus, are dramatised in close adherence to the story as told in the ninth book of Homer's Odyssey. There are no liberties whatever taken with the character or acts of the hero, who seldom appears to such advantage in Euripides' tragedies. But Silenus, with his jovial, idle, low band of satyrs, is brought in as a captive and slave to Polyphemus, thus affording a chorus for the play as well as the buffoon who supplies its comic aspects. The cowardice and love of pleasure, as well as the joviality of the satyrs, are treated with real humour and vivacity, and the scene in which, after solemn promises, they shirk the danger of attacking the sleeping monster, is not unworthy of the best comic writer.
- ↑ Apart from modern Medeas, a popular version of this scene, with the opposite resolution conquering the furious mother, as might be expected in a Christian society, is to be found in Bellini's popular opera of Norma.
- ↑ In Seneca's version, and in the French copies, Phædra is made to confess her passion to Hippolytus in person, and Racine has, moreover, other variations which I need not here discuss. It has been assumed without sufficient evidence by modern critics that this personal declaration was the offensive feature omitted in his second edition by Euripides. This may have been so, but is very rash to assert it.
- ↑ Perhaps the modern censors of the great and good men, who have had their lives marred by errors of this kind, are wrong in underrating this demonic folly in human affairs.
- ↑ The reader may judge for himself by consulting the translation by Shelley, who has effaced the objectionable passages.
- ↑ The franchise brutale of Polyphemus, in declaring his contempt for the gods, is quite a peculiar and a striking piece of character drawing, which merits more attention than it has yet received.