Euripides (Mahaffy)/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
SPECIAL CHARACTERS—HEROINES.
61. It may perhaps surprise the reader that, in approaching the special character drawing of Euripides, we take up female characters first. But whether it be the accident of their preservation, or a peculiar feature in the poet's genius, there can be no doubt that all his greatest portraits are portraits of women. We have reason to think that in some of the lost plays—as, for example, the Philoctetes—there were really great and prominent heroes; but by a peculiar irony of fate, the poet, who was openly reviled in his own day as the hater of women and traducer of their sex, has come down to us as their noblest and most prominent advocate in all Greek literature. We know that the Socratic circle, among other social reforms, desired to improve the condition and education of women, and it is not improbable that Euripides, here as elsewhere one of the new school, contributed his share, with Aspasia, with Socrates, with Plato and Xenophon, to this all-important question. There are no doubt many angry tirades against women in the tragedies; they are commonplace in all Greek literature, and could not be absent from dramatic representations of men and manners. But most of them are spoken in character, by angry or suffering personages, and there is no evidence that they were intended to convey the poet's own bitter experiences. Nor did they at all affect his drawing of female character.
62. There are, in the extant tragedies, only two really disagreeable women—Medea and Hermione (in the Andromache)—for the savage feelings of revenge in Alcmene (Heracleidæ) and in Hecuba are, so to speak, extorted from them by dreadful trials, and the injustice of fate. But Medea is no Greek, she is a foreigner from a wild and gloomy race, who is moreover deeply wronged in her ungovernable but therefore strong affections. She may be a human tigress, but she is a tigress with a mother's heart, and all her violence does not destroy our sympathy with her afflictions. Hermione again is an occasional picture, not meant for a general portrait, but as a special attack on the Spartan women, who were much lauded and admired, against the poet's convictions, throughout Greece. As for his Phædra, I have already explained (§ 49) that she is in no sense drawn as a wicked or sensual woman, but rather as a noble and honourable queen, distracted by an incurable passion sent upon her through the special act of a malignant deity. Let us now turn to the other side, and examine his drawing of female virtues.
63. The ancients long since noticed the prominence of εὐψυχία, courage or fearlessness, in his principal heroines. This is specially shown in four notable instances, by the voluntary choice of death, or fearless submission to it when suddenly announced as impending. But ancient critics were not likely to lay stress on the point of greater interest to modern readers, for which indeed ancient criticism had not even a name—I mean the unselfishness which prompts and accompanies these instances of female heroism. There is no nobler phase of human character, and none on which Euripides has bestowed more minute and careful attention, nor do I think that I need fear contradiction, when I say that it is peculiarly the virtue of women, who show it far oftener than men. Hence, no doubt, we find it in the poet's heroines. We have in the extant plays four characters of this kind, all of whom face death with firm resolve, but each of whom shows interesting variations both of nature and of circumstances.
64. Polyxena.—I will commence with Polyxena, the virgin daughter of Hecuba, who is summoned hastily from within by her distracted mother, and informed that the Greeks have determined to sacrifice her on Achilles' tomb. Her first thought (v. 198) is pity and grief for her mother's bereavement, whom she may no longer console as her fellow-slave. As for her own life she does not give it a thought. And after Hecuba's long pleading with Odysseus, she interferes to cut short the discussion; she consoles herself by enumerating the ills of slavery, in comparison with her former royal life, and departs with an affectionate farewell to her mother, and the inevitable Greek appeal to the sun, which she beholds for the last time. At the tomb she calmly prays the Greeks not to bind her, as she is ashamed, having lived a princess, to die a slave, and she offers herself without flinching to the executioner. (Hecuba vv. 174–584.)
There is here the greatest nobility and purity of character, but the sacrifice is softened to the victim by her family misfortunes, and but for her tender and devoted affection for her bereaved mother, she seems more ready to die than to live. But she dies at the hands of enemies, and to lay the troubled spirit of the destroyer of her house. Thus she passes from the stage, a splendid episode in the sorrows of the Trojan queen.
65. Macaria.—Very similar is the poet's conception of Macaria in the Heracleidæ, but with many variations of great interest. The harried children of Heracles, with their grandmother Alcmene, and family friend and tutor Iolaus, both decrepit with age, have at last found an apparent refuge with Demophon, king of Athens, when an oracle announces that only by the death of a noble virgin can victory be secured against the advancing host of Eurystheus. Macaria, one of the children, comes out to learn the cause of Iolaus' excitement, and apologises for her boldness in so doing; but no sooner has she heard of the difficult position of the Athenians, who wish to protect the fugitives but cannot reconcile themselves to make a sacrifice from their own daughters, than she at once offers herself, contemptuously setting aside Iolaus' proposal to draw lots with her sisters. She paints an ironical picture of the fugitives appealing to others to make sacrifices and sparing themselves, and merely gives directions for her seemly death among women, and that in better days her tomb may be honoured. With affectionate advices to Iolaus concerning the education of her brothers and sisters, the worthy daughter of Heracles departs, hoping that death may end her troubles, and that there may be no future beyond the grave. This hopelessness in so young a creature—the result of constant adversity, is a very pathetic touch in the drawing of her character.[1] The whole picture is much harder than that of Polyxena; there is not even a commos or lyrical lamentation as she leaves the stage; there are no regrets though she is resigning the hope of marriage—to the Greek maiden a bitter loss. But all her hardness is in a noble cause; all her dying charges speak a pure and womanly anxiety for her brothers and sisters' welfare. She is, in fact, precisely such a character as the Antigone of Sophocles (in his Antigone), and strikes us as a nature possibly unbending and stern, but thoroughly honourable and devoted to the law of duty. But she occupies, like Polyxena, only an episode in the play, which has other interests, and not the least the glorification of the humanity and justice of Athens.
66. Iphigenia.—We have a far more explicitly drawn picture in Iphigenia (in Aulis) who is the chief figure in the play, and perhaps the finest gentle heroine in Greek tragedy. We are kept in suspense by the mental conflict of Agamemnon till she enters with her mother and her little brother, and at once fascinates us by her affectionate forwardness to greet her father, whose special favourite she is. Young and fair, full of freshness and hope, she yet has the first tinge of womanliness in her expression, as she is conscious of her coming bridal, and that she must presently leave her delightful home. Thus she retires to the cover of the tents, while the meshes of Fate are gathering about her hopes. When she first hears her father's shameful deceit and her real destiny, her mother leaves her in wild despair—πολλὰς ἱεῖσα μεταβολὰς ὀδυρμάτων.[2] When she reappears to beg for her life she is calmer, but yet supplicates with an earnestness and a sympathy touching beyond expression, for she is no heartbroken captive like Polyxena, no persecuted exile like Macaria; she is still a young, fresh, hopeful creature, strange to the woes of life, and looking forward with bright expectations to its pleasures. Therefore she begs simply for life as such, without any thought of higher responsibilities; and when her craven father flies from her to avoid the agony of refusal, she forthwith bursts again into a lyrical paroxysm, the μεταβολαὶ ὀδυρμάτων.
But when a crowd approaches, and among them Achilles, she desires to fly in shame from her pretended bridegroom. Then follows the anxious dialogue of the hero with Clytemnestra, telling of the commotion in the host, and his own imminent danger in defending the maiden. When Iphigenia speaks after this brief pause, we feel that she has grown years older; all the careless freshness of her childhood is gone;[3] she sees herself the turning-point in a people's fortunes; and with inbred nobility she resigns all her fond hopes of life, to assume the loftier position of a national benefactress. It is not easy to say which of her two great speeches, her childlike supplication (1211 sqq.), or her patriotic self-devotion (1368 sqq.) is the finer. She then deprecates the chivalrous offers of Achilles to defend her, and turns to give her last moments to her mother and the infant Orestes. Nothing can. be more purely womanly and deeply affectionate than this parting. She anticipates her mother's implacable wrath against Agamemnon, and prays her to forgive him. She does not even utter the just complaint against Helen which Tennyson puts into her mouth in his Dream of Fair Women. But she passes again at the end into lyrical excitement, this time of a religious character, as she devotes herself to the goddess whose wrath required so great a sacrifice. With an appeal to the sun and the light of day she leaves the stage.
I need hardly say one word in illustration of this magnificent conception of a gay, affectionate, heedless maiden, just entering upon the highest delights of a splendid life, passing by a sudden crisis into the depths of despair, and then, by one of those momentous changes which only such a crisis can produce, into a sad and mature heroine, in whom noble unselfishness has replaced the gaiety and exuberance of her vanished childhood. But she never ceases to love life; unlike the slave Polyxena, or the exile Macaria, she has everything to lose, and hence she cannot go to her death, as they do, with calm resolve, but with that burning excitement which has sustained the most sensitive, and therefore the greatest martyrs. When Sophocles has given the same feature, this wild excitement at the approach of death, to his stronger and more masculine Antigone, he has not, I think, been so consistent in his drawing of character.
67. Alcestis.—But we have not yet concluded our Euripidean portraits of female heroism. There remains one of his early plays, the exquisite Alcestis, in which he has given us a quite different, and yet not less perfect example of this noblest phase °of human virtue.
In this play the heroine voluntarily resigns her life under no pressure of misfortune, with no lofty patriotic enthusiasm, but simply to save the life of her husband, for whom Apollo has obtained the permission of an exchange. She has everything to lose; she is the queen of a prosperous people, a happy wife, a fond mother, young and beloved of all; and yet these things she resigns—not from a passionate love of her husband, not from an apprehension of her lot as a widow or her children as orphans (to which she only once, and in passing, alludes, vv. 287–288)—but simply from an instinct of unselfishness, and perhaps of duty. It is indeed with consummate art that Euripides, in this far subtler than any of his imitators, has made her husband a somewhat weak and selfish, though otherwise amiable and hospitable, person.[4] In this way the sacrifice of Alcestis becomes strictly an act of pure unselfishness, and as such has not been paralleled in the annals of the stage. The account of her last hours, her calmness and gentleness to her household, her outbreak of tears in her bridal chamber and over her children, her anxiety for their future—need no comment to show their womanly dignity and tenderness. When she is led out by her husband on the stage, her feverish weakness passes into lyrical visions of the nether world, of the gloomy Charon and his boat, of the dark visage of Hades. She faints for a moment, and then with returning consciousness becomes calm again, and speaks her parting instructions and wishes to her husband. Her last words are a farewell to her children.
68. Thus we find that if Euripides drew in his Medea and Phædra, and in the heroines of other lost dramas, burning pictures of passion, he could also draw pure and devoted women, who are hardly inferior to the highest ideals of Christian civilisation. We are not, therefore, surprised that in both conceptions he created permanent types for the stage, and that not only his vindictive but his self-sacrificing heroines have been perpetually revived in modern dramas.
69. When we pass from these first-rate personages to consider his lesser creations, we find a certain poverty which surprises us. Most of them are, in fact, suffering women; who, though they are always intellectually strong and able to argue their case against their opponents, affect us rather by their circumstances than their character. Such are his Andromache (both in the Andromache and the Troades) and his Hecuba, though her savagery—like that of Alcmena at the end of the Heracleidæ—adds an unpleasant trait, which Euripides seems to have found common enough in the old Greek women of his time. Yet his aged Æthra (Supplices) and Jocasta (Phœnissæ) are examples of motherly and sympathetic natures, and show that here too his view was broad and comprehensive. So also the Antigone of the Phœnissæ and the Cassandra of the Troades, though not fully drawn characters, yet attract us—the one by her strong family affections, and the other by the fatal clearness of her prophetic vision, for in both cases these features are the direct cause of their tragic misfortunes.
70. Four only remain, which may here receive more special notice; two of them—Creusa and the Tauric Iphigenia—heroines of circumstance, the other two—Electra and Clytemnestra—heroines of character also. It happens that three of these, each occurring in separate plays, are drawn on consistent lines; but I must impress on the reader that this is an accident. The Greek tragic poets did not attach a fixed character to each hero or heroine who recurred constantly in their plays.[5] Thus the majority of the plays in the Trojan cycle represent Helen as an abandoned and contemptible woman, and such she reappears in the Orestes; but in the Helena she is a faithful and affectionate wife, suffering unjustly under an unbearable load of calumny and hatred. Similar variations of drawing were admitted, through Euripides' plays, in Menelaus, in Odysseus, and probably in other persons. We may therefore conclude from this evidence that while consistent portraits of noted legendary personages were not the rule, they were not a rare exception.
71. The Tauric Iphigenia is a very beautiful conception of a Greek maiden in exile, compelled by the gloomy rites of Artemis, whose priestess she is, to sacrifice all Greeks that are cast upon the coast—a service which she performs with reluctance and with deep compassion, not without sceptical questioning concerning the morality of her office, or the interpretation of the real demands of the goddess. Her longing for her home and country gives her a special interest in every hapless Greek victim; and though the conviction of her brother's death for a moment hardens her heart with bitterness (vv. 344 sqq.), the sight of the captives brings back her better self; and her persistent sympathy, though at first rejected by her unknown victims, is the cause of a mutual recognition and their escape from a fearful fate.
72. I find in the Creusa (of the Ion), under widely different circumstances, a sort of family likeness to this Iphigenia. Both are the victims of harsh dispensations, which they cannot justify, but which they bear with patience, though not with acquiescence. Both have that sympathy for like suffering which gives so peculiar a charm to their dialogue. Both endeavour to right themselves by taking the law into their own hands, and are only saved from failure by the intervention of the gods. Creusa indeed attempts a horrible and treacherous crime, thus exhibiting the latent fury which Euripides so often finds in the recesses of the female heart. But we may well excuse or palliate her offence, when we consider how her long-deferred hopes, now at the moment of expected fulfilment, are dashed to the ground, and her whole moral balance is destroyed by this crowning injustice of the god to whom she had appealed. Both heroines are only heroines of suffering, but they have nevertheless a charm which none but a great artist can convey.
73. Electra.—Very different is the strong but not agreeable portrait or Electra. Her devotion to her brother, in the Orestes, and indeed everywhere, is very touching, and is brought out into splendid relief in the opening of the Orestes, when she sits by her brother, who has at last fallen asleep after fierce paroxysms of insanity. The chorus enter and inquire about him with some importunity, as is the wont of the Greek chorus. Her agitated replies, the gradual awakening and grateful tenderness of Orestes, his return of madness, are all worked in with consummate skill.[6] But these womanly and refined features are balanced by a strong, bitter, outspoken hatred against Clytemnestra (in the Electra), which gives rise to painful scenes of wrangling and altercation. This is no innovation by our poet. The parallel portrait by Sophocles is not different. Her querulous irony, and downright exposure of Clytemnestra's vices, when that queen is decoyed into a visit to her humble home, her ostentation of poverty and disgrace as a protest against her mother—are not inconsistent with the unrelenting hardness which keeps the troubled and wavering Orestes to his purpose, and insists upon the murder, though she is not free from terror when the deed is done. She is everywhere represented as a strong character, whose hate has been kept alive by constant oppression and the continual presence of her mother's sin, while Orestes comes from abroad, and has not these daily annoyances to chafe his galled spirit.
74. The Clytemnestra of the two plays (Iphigenia in Aulis and Electra) is not quite the same. As the good and anxious mother, coming to her daughter's marriage, she is a stronger and more decided person than she appears in her later life, and were we authorised to hold that the poet meant her for the same character, ingenious reflections might be multiplied upon his art in softening her fierceness under the influence of dark memories and the stings of remorse. But this maturer picture is in the earlier play. It is, however, in itself a masterly sketch, and well-nigh the reverse of Æschylus', perhaps still more of Alfieri's, conception, who represents the guilty queen and her paramour as reaping no happiness from their crime, but growing old in mutual dissension and increasing estrangement. Euripides represents Clytemnestra indeed as still the stronger spirit, and Ægisthus as a mere worthless and vulgar paramour; but though she is ready to argue with the bitter Electra, and justify her crime as a retaliation for her husband's injustices, she submits with patience to fierce reproaches, and expresses sorrow and pity that her daughter should incur harsh treatment on account of her violence.[7] She confesses that her past life is a burden to her conscience, and would if possible so far reconcile Electra with Ægisthus, as to live in peace with both. These softer lines make her punishment more affecting and tragic, though not the less just. She bears, in fact, the strongest family likeness to the queen in Hamlet—not the only stray coincidence between Euripides and Shakspere. But this gentler side of her character is a mere fugitive touch, for it was no part of the Greek legend to represent her morally purified, but rather as justly punished for her crime. Hence the reproofs which in Hamlet are urged by an affectionate son, are by Euripides put into the mouth of the sarcastic revengeful Electra.
75. We have now reviewed this side of the poet's genius with as much detail as our space permits. There is but little to be said about lesser female characters, such as nurses, in the plays. The nurse of the Medea is merely an old and trusty but somewhat sententious servant. The nurse of Phædra is the prototype of Juliet's nurse, a person in whom attachment and complaisance replace morality, and who in the Hippolytus is dramatically very useful by conveying the declaration which Phædra is too noble and modest to utter. This delicacy in the drawing of Phædra was lost upon Seneca and Racine, who degrade her to be her own advocate before the astonished Hippolytus.
The total outcome of the foregoing chapter may perhaps seem poor to some readers accustomed to the study of Shakspere's characters. It is therefore but fair to observe, in conclusion, that quite apart from the injustice of comparing anyone else with so unique a genius as Shakspere, there are distinct reasons why the characters of Euripides, even were they equally well drawn, should not appear to us so various or life-like. For we do not always remember when reading Greek tragedies, that they are interpreted to us either by Greek scholiasts, the most hopelessly undramatic of men, or by modern professors, who are hardly better judges of the stage. Thus there is not a really subtle point in the Greek play which these people can appreciate, and we even find in the Greek scholia objections to the finest passages of extant plays. In no case, except when they have been acted in loose and unfaithful modern versions, has any one of them been studied by a practical actor. The plays of Shakspere, on the other hand, are handed down to us not merely with a body of textual criticism, but with the growing tradition of what each great actor finds, or perhaps puts into the text. Thus we read Shakspere by the light of Kembles, and Keans, and Irvings—a far different kind of commentators from the Hermanns, and Valckenaers, and Elmsleys, and Musgraves, whom the classical scholar is required to read. Until, in fact, there arises a great tragic actor, who is also a thorough Greek scholar, we shall probably remain in ignorance of many of the finest acting points by which Euripides made his characters to breathe and burn before his Athenian audience.
- ↑ Iphigenia, on the contrary, whose life has been happy, and whose hopes are fair, simply prays that she may not see "the realms beneath the earth," because it is madness to wish to abandon the present life. The real narrative of her sacrifice is unfortunately lost by a mutilation of our MSS.
- ↑ Passing through every key of lamentation—a splendid metaphor from musical modulations which can hardly be adequately rendered in English.
- ↑ This sudden and great change, produced by a frightful crisis, offended the wretched scholiasts, who complain that the poet was inconsistent in his portrait.
- ↑ Indeed, the whole play has sometimes been regarded as panegyric on hospitality—a virtue often combined in men with selfishness.
- ↑ Similarly in the later comedy of Menandcr, and its Latin imitations, so careless were the poets in giving the same name to varying characters, that they missed one of the greatest helps to immortalising a striking portrait of human nature. Their Chremes or Pamphilus was little more than a badge to distinguish their personages within a single play.
- ↑ The English render who desires to enjoy this great scene will find an excellent poetical version of it in the first volume of Mr. Symonds' Studies of the Greek Poets, p. 224.
- ↑ Electra, vv. 1102–1110.