Euripides (Mahaffy)/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
HIS LYRIC POETRY—CHORAL ODES, MONODIES.
88. I have hitherto designedly kept out of sight an important feature in all Greek tragedy—the chorus, which was its origin, and which stamped upon it a peculiar character. As is well known, the first actor was originally severed from the chorus, to represent the adventures of Dionysus, and recite them to his sympathetic companions. Hence, when actor after actor was added, the chorus still held an important place in the plot, and was always there—an audience within the audience, a play within the play, like the scene in Hamlet.[1] We see its earliest form in the Supplices of Æschylus, where the fugitive daughters of Danaus are themselves the chief personages in the play. So, also, in the awful Eumenides of the same poet, the Furies are the leading figures, and their claims the centrepoint of the piece. When we come to the more developed character plays of Sophocles the chorus necessarily becomes a spectator, but a deeply interested and sympathetic spectator, singing, moreover, those hymns to the gods—dirges, or pæans, which come within the action of the piece, and require choral music and solemn dancing for their performance. Thus every early Greek dramatist was of necessity also a lyric poet, and a lyric poet in a far more prominent sense than are our dramatists, who insert here and there an occasional song. At the same time it is absurd to speak of any of the early tragedians, or of Aristophanes and his compeers, as owing to their lyrics any large element in their fame. It is because they were great dramatists that they are immortal.
89. But in no case was there ever any heroism expected from the chorus. In no instance did it represent "an ideal spectator," but rather that average and timid morality which cannot rise above the religion of orthodoxy or the ethics of prudence, and thus either recals the chief actor from his noble extravagance, or reminds him of the traditional duties which his impatience has transgressed. To take two examples from the model of tragic perfection, Sophocles. In the opening of the Œdipus Coloneus, the chorus persists, with vulgar and impertinent obtrusion, in questioning the wretched Œdipus concerning his shameful history. In the Philoctetes, when the hero is fallen asleep, it suggests to Neoplolemus that now is the moment to steal the bow, and make off, leaving him to his fate (vv. 849 sqq.).
90. It is not, therefore, a true or sensible criticism to say that Euripides degraded his chorus, and first made them accomplices of the actor's crime. Such examples could doubtless have been found in a fuller catalogue of the older tragedies. The fact is that Euripides used his chorus with every possible variety. There are extant plays—the Supplices, Troades, Bacchæ—where the chorus is of capital importance and a leading feature in the play, nor is the opening chorus of the Supplices distinguishable in character from a chorus of Æschylus. There are other plays—the Heracleidæ, Hecuba, Alcestis—where they are deeply interested spectators, never singing except in harmony with the piece, and with the feelings suggested by the scenes. In these cases Euripides adhered to the traditions of his predecessors.
91. But there are other plays, especially the melodramas, in which the chorus sympathise so deeply with the actor as to become his accomplices, and aid in the plot generally with prevarication and with deceit. Such is the part of the chorus in the Medea, where they side against their own royal house; in the Tauric Iphigenia, where they endeavour to mislead a messenger with falsehood; in the Ion, where they screen Creusa's crime.
This is considered an Euripidean innovation in tragedy, and perhaps the criticism is just. But in no case does this narrower sympathy prevent them from recalling the spectators, in their odes, to the broader and more philosophic aspects of the story. The dolours of old age and childlessness, the obligations of noble birth, the calamities of violent desire, the idleness of abstract speculation, these high topics are sung in the odes of his partisan chorus. There are, moreover, plays in which he went a step farther, and foreshadowed that abandonment of the chorus which marked the new comedy. He seeks out a stranger chorus, with no more than a general interest in the actors, and allows them to sing irrelevant odes, as a mere rest to the actors and the audience, in those intervals which we should mark by the close of successive acts. Such are the chorus of the Helena and of the Phœnissæ—the latter, Phœnician maidens sojourning by an accident at Thebes, and witnessing the horrors of the siege, with its suicides, fratricides, and exiles. Such again are the chorus of the Iphigenia, maidens of Eubœa, who have crossed over from curiosity to visit the fleet at Aulis.
This is evidently the deliberate innovation of Euripides, and it gives him far greater scope and licence in the topics which his lyric poetry embraces. Hence some of his deepest philosophic teaching was conveyed in these odes, and it was his habit, even with the most interested chorus, to open an ode with reflections on life and morals, and at the end of the first pair of verses (strophes), turn to the special subject of the play with a change of metre and of melody.
It is, however, not true to say that the chorus generally represented the poet's own mind. As with Aristophanes, it is often in the soliloquies of the actors that we see through the mask, and find the poet behind his character. But we have lost the clue which no doubt existed, whereby some gesture or change of tone told the audience that here the poet, and not his personages or chorus, addressed them.
92. With the almost complete loss of Greek music, we have lost the melodies and musical accompaniments which are necessary to the full enjoyment of Greek lyric poetry. If we except the poets of Lesbos—Alcæus, Sappho, and Anacreon—who sang in short simple verses of uniform structure, all the higher and choral lyric poetry of the Greeks was composed in long and complicated stanzas, to which the phrasing of the melody, and the figures of the dance, gave the rhythmical key. We moderns use for a melody, which contains several musical phrases of various length and accent, the simple rhymes of our poetry, though they seldom embrace more than pairs of lines, which we expand and vary by repetitions. The Greek lyric poet made his poetical strophe to correspond with the whole melody, and thus introduced that more intricate system of long and short lines, and of various metres, which is so puzzling to the modern student. The early Greek poets seldom used refrains—the easiest way of accentuating rhythm. In addition to the splendid example in the choruses of Æschylus' Eumenides, where a dread incantation scene is wonderfully intensified by a refrain, there are but a few examples in Euripides' lyrics, in the Ion (v. 127), the Bacchæ (v. 877), and the Electra (v. 113). Yet with some practice it is possible to feel the majestic music of this larger and more artistic poetry. Here is one of the simpler specimens, accentuated as it should be read,[2] for convenience sake.
Hippol. 525 sqq.
1. Ἐ-ρώς Ἐρώς, ὁ κατ᾽ ὄμματων
ψυ-χαῖς χαριν οὕς ἐπίστρατεύσῃ
μη μοί ποτε σύν κακῷ φανείης,
μήδ᾽ ἀρρύθμος ἔλθοις
οὔτε γάρ πυρος οὔτ᾽
ἀσ-τρών ὑπέρτερόν βελος
οἱ-όν το τᾶς Ἀφροδίτας
ἱ-ήσιν ἔκ χερων
Ἐ-ρώς ὁ Διός παῖς
2. Ἀλ-λώς ἀλλώς παρα τ᾽ Ἄλφεῳ
φοι-βού τ᾽ ἐπι πύθιοίς τεράμνοις
βου-τάν φονον Ἕλλας αἶ᾽ ἀέξει.
Ἐ-ρώτα δε τόν τυράννον ἄνδρων
τόν τας Ἄφροδίτας
φίλτατών θαλαμων
κλη-δούχον, οὔ σεβίζομεν
περ-θόντα καί δια πάσας
ἰ-όντα σύμφορᾶς,
θνα-τοίς ὁταν ἔλθῇ.
Mr. Browning has honoured me (Dec. 18, 1878) with the following translation of these stanzas, so that the general reader may not miss the meaning or the spirit of the ode. The English metre, though not a strict reproduction, gives an excellent idea of the original.
I.
Oh Love, Love, thou that from the eyes diffusest
Yearning, and on the soul sweet grace inducest—
Souls against whom thy hostile march is made—
Never to me be manifest in ire,
Nor, out of time and tune, my peace invade!
Since neither from the fire—
No, nor the stars—is launched a bolt more mighty
Than that of Aphrodité
Hurled from the hands of Love, the boy with Zeus for sire.
II.
Idly, how idly, by the Alpheian river
And in the Pythian shrines of Phœbus, quiver
Blood-offerings from the bull, which Hellas heaps:
While Love we worship not—the Lord of men!
Worship not him, the very key who keeps
Of Aphrodité, when
She closes up her dearest chamber-portals:
Love, when he comes to mortals,
Wide-wasting, through those deeps of woes beyond the deep!
93. But even where the modern scholar is not able to feel distinctly the music of the metre, there is infinite beauty and variety in the choral odes of Euripides. Thus we find him celebrating the birth and establishment of Apollo at Delphi in an ode (Iphigenia in Tauris, 1234) of the dignity and power of Pindar, to whose style this piece has a strong family likeness. Again the parodos, or opening song of the Supplices (vv. 42 sqq.), is thoroughly Æschylean in tone and conception, and the ode on Ares in the Phœnissæ (v. 784)—an ode very easy to read from its simple dactylic structure—is well worthy of the best of the older masters. The pathetic descriptive odes of the fall of Troy in both Hecuba and the Troades are more peculiar to himself, and masterpieces in their way; where he competes with Sophocles in singing the power of love, or the sad destinies of old age (Hippolytus, 525; Hercules Furens, 637), he seems to me hardly inferior to that acknowledged prince of poets. The last I will quote in full, is a fragment from the Cresphontes, as we have it in Mr. Browning's version (Arist. Apol. p. 179).
Peace, in whom depths of wealth lie—of the blest
Immortals beauteousest,—
Come I for the heart within me dies away,
So long dost thou delay!
O I have feared lest old age, much annoy,
Conquer me, quite outstrip the tardy joy;
Thy gracious triumph-season I would see,
The song, the dance, the sport, profuse of crowns to be.
But come! for my sake, goddess great and dear,
Come to the city here!
Hateful Sedition drive thou from our homes,
With her who madly roams
Rejoicing in the steel against the life
That's whetted—banish Strife!
This lyric excellence is the more remarkable when we remember that Euripides was thoroughly opposed to that style which had been adopted in the lyrics of Pindar and of Æschylus, and is now again in high fashion—I mean the sacrificing of clearness, both of images and of construction, to vague grandeur and the licence of poetic inspiration. He fascinates us by the beauty of his imagery, by the striking picturesqueness of his descriptions—a rare feature in Greek poetry, and by profound and pathetic reflection upon life and character. But when his text is not corrupt, he is hardly ever difficult or obscure. It is the fashion to say that his lyrics are feeble and watery as compared with those of Sophocles or Aristophanes—and no doubt if we compare the poorest of Euripides' odes with the best of Sophocles', we may obtain such a result. But if we had a selection from the lesser works of Sophocles, it seems likely that this opinion would be found untenable, seeing that the lyrics of Euripides, in spite of the most keen and bitter censure, became popular immediately, and outran, in the estimation of society, the works of the older school. It is proved by the very complaints of Aristophanes.
94. Much of what has here been said applies to those lyrical soliloquies, or monodies, which are in Greek tragedy the nearest approach to the arias of our opera, in which the chief actors express the excitement of grief, or fear, or hope, with the aid of music. One form, the commos, a funeral lament, in which the chorus joined in alternate strains with two actors, is common as a closing scene in Æschylus and Sophocles; but Euripides extended the lyrical expression of emotion, and applied it to various situations. Thus some of his plays, like the Ion and the Andromeda, opened with such a monody. In the Ion also there is a magnificent soliloquy of Creusa, set in the same form. The excitement of Iphigenia (in Aulis), as that of Sophocles' Antigone, finds vent in the same hurried irregular metre, wild imagery, and musical cadence.[3] Indeed the musical improvements of the age seem to have been so considerable, that the poet was tempted to exaggerate this side of tragedy, and provide a new æsthetic delight for his audience apart from mere tragic emotion. It may have been the same sort of change as we have seen from the spoken dialogue of the older opera to the carefully orchestrated recitatives of our own day, which provide the audience with musical pleasures quite apart from the formally numbered airs or concerted pieces.
This combination of a considerable proportion of lyric verse with quiet iambic dialogue is one of the features in which Greek tragedy—from many points of view so much simpler than our drama—obtains a greater lightness and variety. Any English reader may prove it for himself by comparing Mr, Browning's Alcestis (in Balaustion's Adventure) with his Raging Heracles (in Aristophanes' Apology). In the former he has neglected this variety, in the latter he has reproduced it. There can be no question as to the general effect. It is remarkable that among the many varieties of pathetic metre we have but one passage in elegiacs, the lament in the Andromache (vv. 104–116); thus showing, I think, that this once popular measure was not considered appropriate in dramatic poetry.
95. I will notice in conclusion yet another use of lyric metres which is peculiarly effective in Euripides—the combination of staid iambics with the most agitated lyrics, in dialogues where the emotions of the speakers are widely different. Several signal instances occur to me. In the Alcestis, Admetus appears leading out and supporting his dying wife. He expresses his calmer grief in iambics, while her visions of the kingdom of the dead, of the gloomy boat and impatient Charon, interrupt him in agitated lyric verse. Similarly, in the Raging Heracles, when Theseus enters (v. 1163) as a dignified stranger, and marvels at the confusion of the house and the bodies of the dead, the aged Amphitryon answers his iambic questioning in extraordinarily hurried and agitated metre (resolved dochmiacs), which give a peculiarly dramatic effect to a splendid scene. I have already cited above (§ 49) similar passages from the Hippolytus.
- ↑ The device of a chorus within the chorus was very rare, and applied by Euripides in the Hippolytus, where the hero's followers are such a παραχορήγημα, as the Greeks call it. The same may be said of the companions of Odysseus, in the Cyclops, but they are silent actors; and we hear that the poet also had such a second chorus (of shepherds) in his lost Alexander (Paris), and in the Antiope.
- ↑ The question of Greek accentuation is a very difficult one, for the modern Greeks pronounce accurately according to the accents found in our MSS. from the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. onward; and that this pronunciation is not altogether new appears from the fact that Sanskrit accents agree remarkably with them. This, in fact, points to accentuation as an original feature in Aryan speech, and older than our oldest Greek literature. On the other hand, none of the metres from Homer to Menander can be read by accent, and the modern Greeks cannot read hexameters or lyric verse without sacrificing their pronunciation. Nay, even the subtle rhythmical laws discovered in prose writers like Isocrates and Demosthenes are altogether determined by quantity and never by accent. Hence I have ventured to accentuate in this passage the syllables marked by quantity, though the appearance of the ode will shock scholars, I cannot, however, here go at greater length into this intricate question.
- ↑ I have above (§ 48) noticed the exceptional iambic scene in the Medea.