Lectures Delivered in America in 1874

The Chorus might be composed of what the poet would.  Of ancient citizens, waiting for their sons to come back from the war, as in the Agamemnon of Æschylus; of sea-nymphs, as in his Prometheus Bound; even of the very Furies who hunt the matricide, as in his Eumenides; of Senators as in the Antigone of Sophocles; or of village farmers as in his Œdipus at Colonos—and now I have named five of the greatest poems, as I hold, written by mortal man till Dante rose.  Or it may be the Chorus was composed—as in the comedies of Aristophanes, the greatest humourist the world has ever seen—of birds, or of frogs, or even of clouds.  It may rise to the level of Don Quixote, or sink to that of Sancho Panza; for it is always the incarnation of such wisdom, heavenly or earthly, as the poet wishes the people to bring to bear on the subject-matter!

But let the poets themselves, rather than me, speak awhile.  Allow me to give you a few specimens of these choruses—the first as an example of that practical, and yet surely not un-divine wisdom, by which they supplied the place of our modern preacher, or essayist, or didactic poet.

Listen to this of the old men’s chorus in the Agamemnon, in the spirited translation of my friend Professor Blackie:—

   ’Twas said of old, and ’tis said to-day,   That wealth to prosperous stature grown      Begets a birth of its own:   That a surfeit of evil by good is prepared,   And sons must bear what allotment of woe      Their sires were spared.   But this I refuse to believe: I know      That impious deeds conspire   To beget an offspring of impious deeds      Too like their ugly sire.But whoso is just, though his wealth like a riverFlow down, shall be scathless: his house shall rejoice   In an offspring of beauty for ever.   The heart of the haughty delights to beget   A haughty heart.  From time to time   In children’s children recurrent appears      The ancestral crime.When the dark hour comes that the gods have decreedAnd the Fury burns with wrathful fires,   A demon unholy, with ire unabated,   Lies like black night on the halls of the fated;   And the recreant Son plunges guiltily on      To perfect the guilt of his Sires.But Justice shines in a lowly cell;In the homes of poverty, smoke-begrimed,With the sober-minded she loves to dwell.   But she turns asideFrom the rich man’s house with averted eye,The golden-fretted halls of prideWhere hands with lucre are foul, and the praiseOf counterfeit goodness smoothly sways;And wisely she guides in the strong man’s despite   All things to an issue of right.

Let me now give you another passage from the Eumenides—or Furies, of Æschylus.

Orestes, prince of Argos, you must remember, has avenged on his mother Clytemnestra the murder of his father, king Agamemnon, on his return from Troy.  Pursued by the Furies, he takes refuge in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, and then, still Fury-haunted, goes to Athens, where Pallas Athené the warrior-maiden, the tutelary goddess of Athens, bids him refer his cause to the Areopagus, the highest court of Athens, Apollo acting as his advocate, and she sitting as umpire in the midst.  The white and black balls are thrown into the urn, and are equal; and Orestes is only delivered by the decision of Athené—as the representative of the nearer race of gods, the Olympians, the friends of man, in whose likeness man is made.  The Furies are the representatives of the older and darker creed—which yet has a depth of truth in it—of the irreversible dooms which underlie all nature; and which represent the Law, and not the Gospel, the consequence of the mere act, independent of the spirit which has prompted it.

They break out in fury against the overbearing arrogance of these younger gods.  Athené bears their rage with equanimity, addresses them in the language of kindness, even of veneration, till these so indomitable beings are unable to withstand the charm of her mild eloquence.  They are to have a sanctuary in the Athenian land, and to be called no more Furies (Erinnys), but Eumenides—the well-conditioned—the kindly goddesses.  And all ends with a solemn procession round the orchestra, with hymns of blessing, while the terrible Chorus of the Furies, clothed in black, with blood-stained girdles, and serpents in their hair, in masks having perhaps somewhat of the terrific beauty of Medusa-masks, are convoyed to their new sanctuary by a procession of children, women, and old men in purple robes and torches in their hands, after Athené and the Furies have sung, in response to each other, a chorus from which I must beg leave to give you an extract or two.

Eldest Fury (Leader of the Chorus)Far from thy dwelling, and far from thy border,By the grace of my godhead benignant I orderThe blight which may blacken the bloom of the trees.Far from thy border, and far from thy dwelling,Be the hot blast which shrivels the bud in its swelling,The seed-rotting taint, and the creeping disease.Thy flocks be still doubled, thy seasons be steady,And when Hermes is near thee, thy hand be still ready   The Heaven-dropt bounty to seize.AthenéHear her words, my city’s warders—Fraught with blessings, she prevailethWith Olympians and Infernals,Dread Erinnys much revered.Mortal faith she guideth plainlyTo what goal she pleaseth, sendingSongs to some, to others daysWith tearful sorrows dulled.Furies   Far from thy border   The lawless disorderThat sateless of evil shall reign;   Far from thy dwelling,   The dear blood welling,That taints thine own hearth with the slain.   When slaughter from slaughter   Shall flow like the water,And rancour from rancour shall grow.   But joy with joy blending,   Live, each to all lending;And hating one-hearted the foe.   When bliss hath departed;   From love single-hearted,A fountain of healing shall flow.AthenéWisely now the tongue of kindnessThou hast found, the way of love.And these terror-speaking facesNow look wealth to me and mine.Her so willing, ye more willing,Now receive.  This land and city,On ancient right securely throned,Shall shine for evermore.FuriesHail, and all hail, mighty people, be greeted,On the sons of Athena shines sunshine the clearest.Blest people, near Jove the Olympian seated.And dear to the maiden his daughter the dearest.Timely wise ’neath the wings of the daughter ye gather,And mildly looks down on her children the Father.

Those of you here who love your country as well as the old Athenians loved theirs, will feel at once the grand political significance of such a scene, in which patriotism and religion become one—and feel, too, the exquisite dramatic effect of the innocent, the weak, the unwarlike, welcoming among them, without fear, because without guilt, those ancient snaky-haired sisters, emblems of all that is most terrible and most inscrutable, in the destiny of nations, of families, and of men:

To their hallowed habitations’Neath Ogygian earth’s foundationsIn that darksome hallSacrifice and supplicationShall not fail.  In adorationSilent worship all.

Listen again, to the gentler patriotism of a gentler poet, Sophocles himself.  The village of Colonos, a mile from Athens, was his birthplace; and in his Œdipus Coloneus, he makes his Chorus of village officials sing thus of their consecrated olive grove:

   In good hap, stranger, to these rural seats   Thou comest, to this region’s blest retreats,   Where white Colonos lifts his head,   And glories in the bounding steed.Where sadly sweet the frequent nightingale   Impassioned pours his evening song,And charms with varied notes each verdant vale,   The ivy’s dark-green boughs among,   Or sheltered ’neath the clustering vine   Which, high above him form a bower,   Safe from the sun or stormy shower,   Where frolic Bacchus often roves,And visits with his fostering nymphs the groves.   Bathed in the dew of heaven each morn,   Fresh is the fair Narcissus born,   Of those great gods the crown of old;   The crocus glitters, robed in gold.Here restless fountains ever murmuring glide,   And as their crispèd streamlets play,To feed, Cephisus, thine unfailing tide,   Fresh verdure marks their winding way.   Here oft to raise the tuneful song   The virgin band of Muses deigns,And car-borne Aphrodite guides her golden reins.

Then they go on, this band of village elders, to praise the gods for their special gifts to that small Athenian land.  They praise Pallas Athené, who gave their forefathers the olive; then Poseidon—Neptune, as the Romans call him—who gave their forefathers the horse; and something more—the ship,—the horse of the sea, as they, like the old Norse Vikings after them, delighted to call it.—

Our highest vaunt is this—Thy grace,   Poseidon, we behold.The ruling curb, embossed with gold,Controls the courser’s managed pace.Though loud, oh king, thy billows roar,Our strong hands grasp the labouring oar,And while the Nereids round it play,Light cuts our bounding bark its way.

What a combination of fine humanities!  Dance and song, patriotism and religion, so often parted among us, have flowed together into one in these stately villagers; each a small farmer; each a trained soldier, and probably a trained seaman also; each a self-governed citizen; and each a cultured gentleman, if ever there were gentlemen on earth.

But what drama, doing, or action—for such is the meaning of the word—is going on upon the stage, to be commented on by the sympathizing Chorus?

One drama, at least, was acted in Athens in that year—440 b.c.—which you, I doubt not, know well—that Antigone of Sophocles, which Mendelssohn has resuscitated, in our own generation, by setting it to music, divine indeed, though very different from the music to which it was set, probably by Sophocles himself, at its first, and for ought we know, its only representation.  For pieces had not then, as now, a run of a hundred nights and more.  The Athenian genius was so fertile, and the Athenian audience so eager for novelty, that new pieces were demanded, and were forthcoming, for each of the great festivals, and if a piece was represented a second time it was usually after an interval of some years.  They did not, moreover, like the moderns, run every night to some theatre or other, as a part of the day’s amusement.  Tragedy, and even comedy, were serious subjects, calling out, not a passing sigh, or passing laugh, but all the higher faculties and emotions.  And as serious subjects were to be expressed in verse and music, which gave stateliness, doubtless, even to the richest burlesques of Aristophanes, and lifted them out of mere street-buffoonery into an ideal fairy land of the grotesque, how much more stateliness must verse and music have added to their tragedy!  And how much have we lost, toward a true appreciation of their dramatic art, by losing almost utterly not only the laws of their melody and harmony, but even the true metric time of their odes! music and metre, which must have surely been as noble as their poetry, their sculpture, their architecture, possessed by the same exquisite sense of form and of proportion.  One thing we can understand—how this musical form of the drama, which still remains to us in lower shapes, in the oratorio, in the opera, must have helped to raise their tragedies into that ideal sphere in which they all, like the Antigone, live and move.  So ideal and yet so human; nay rather, truly ideal, because truly human.  The gods, the heroes, the kings, the princesses of Greek tragedy were dear to the hearts of Greek republicans, not merely as the founders of their states, not merely as the tutelary deities, many of them, of their country: but as men and women like themselves, only more vast; with mightier wills, mightier virtues, mightier sorrows, and often mightier crimes; their inward free-will battling, as Schlegel has well seen, against outward circumstance and overruling fate, as every man should battle, unless he sink to be a brute.  ‘In tragedy,’ says Schlegel—uttering thus a deep and momentous truth—‘the gods themselves either come forward as the servants of destiny and mediate executors of its decrees, or approve themselves godlike only by asserting their liberty of action and entering upon the same struggles with fate which man himself has to encounter.’  And I believe this, that this Greek tragedy, with its godlike men and manlike gods, and heroes who had become gods by the very vastness of their humanity, was a preparation, and it may be a necessary preparation, for the true Christian faith in a Son of man, who is at once utterly human and utterly divine.  Man is made in the likeness of God—is the root-idea, only half-conscious, only half-expressed, but instinctive, without which neither the Greek Tragedies, nor the Homeric Poems, six hundred years before them, could have been composed.  Doubtless the idea that man was like a god degenerated too often into the idea that the gods were like men, and as wicked.  But that travestie of a great truth is not confined to those old Greeks.  Some so-called Christian theories—as I hold—have sinned in that direction as deeply as the Athenians of old.

Meanwhile, I say, that this long acquiescence in the conception of godlike struggle, godlike daring, godlike suffering, godlike martyrdom; the very conception which was so foreign to the mythologies of any other race—save that of the Jews, and perhaps of our own Teutonic forefathers—did prepare, must have prepared, men to receive as most rational and probable, as the satisfaction of their highest instincts, the idea of a Being in whom all those partial rays culminated in clear, pure light; of a Being at once utterly human and utterly divine; who by struggle, suffering, self-sacrifice, without a parallel, achieved a victory over circumstance and all the dark powers which beleaguer man without a parallel likewise.

Take, as an example, the figure which you know best—the figure of Antigone herself—devoting herself to be entombed alone, for the sake of love and duty.  Love of a brother, which she can only prove, alas! by burying his corpse.  Duty to the dead, an instinct depending on no written law, but springing out of the very depths of those blind and yet sacred monitions which prove that the true man is not an animal, but a spirit; fulfilling her holy purpose, unchecked by fear, unswayed by her sisters’ entreaties.  Hardening her heart magnificently till her fate is sealed; and then after proving her godlike courage, proving the tenderness of her womanhood by that melodious wail over her own untimely death and the loss of marriage joys, which some of you must know from the music of Mendelssohn, and which the late Dean Milman has put into English thus—

Come, fellow-citizens, and seeThe desolate Antigone.On the last path her steps shall tread,Set forth, the journey of the dead,Watching, with vainly lingering gaze,Her last, last sun’s expiring rays,Never to see it, never more,For down to Acheron’s dread shore,A living victim am I ledTo Hades’ universal bed.To my dark lot no bridal joysBelong, nor e’er the jocund noiseOf hymeneal chant shall sound for me,But death, cold death, my only spouse shall be.Oh tomb!  Oh bridal chamber!  Oh deep-delvedAnd strongly-guarded mansion!  I descendTo meet in your dread chambers all my kindred,Who in dark multitudes have crowded downWhere Proserpine received the dead.  But I,The last, and oh how few more miserable,Go down, or ere my sands of life are run.

And let me ask you whether the contemplation of such a self-sacrifice should draw you, should have drawn those who heard the tale nearer to, or further from, a certain cross which stood on Calvary some 1800 years ago?  May not the tale of Antigone heard from mother or from nurse have nerved ere now some martyr-maiden to dare and suffer in an even holier cause?

But to return.  This set purpose of the Athenian dramatists of the best school to set before men a magnified humanity, explains much in their dramas which seem to us at first not only strange but faulty.  The masks which gave one grand but unvarying type of countenance to each well-known historic personage, and thus excluded the play of feature, animated gesture, and almost all which we now consider as ‘acting’ proper; the thicksoled cothurni which gave the actor a more than human stature; the poverty (according to our notions) of the scenery, which usually represented merely the front of a palace or other public place, and was often though not always unchanged during the whole performance; the total absence in fact, of anything like that scenic illusion which most managers of theatres seem now to consider as their highest achievement; the small number of the actors, two, or at most three only, being present on the stage at once,—the simplicity of the action, in which intrigue (in the play-house sense) and any complication of plot are utterly absent; all this must have concentrated not the eye of the spectator on the scene, but his ear upon the voice, and his emotions on the personages who stood out before him without a background, sharp-cut and clear as a group of statuary which is the same, place it where you will, complete in itself—a world of beauty, independent of all other things and beings save on the ground on which it needs must stand.  It was the personage rather than his surroundings, which was to be impressed by every word on the spectator’s heart and intellect; and the very essence of Greek tragedy is expressed in the still famous words of Medea—

Che resta?  Io.

Contrast this with the European drama—especially with the highest form of it—our own Elizabethan.  It resembles, as has been often said in better words than mine, not statuary but painting.  These dramas affect colour, light, and shadow, background whether of town or country, description of scenery where scenic machinery is inadequate, all in fact, which can blend the action and the actors with the surrounding circumstances, without letting them altogether melt into the circumstances; which can show them a part of the great whole, by harmony or discord with the whole universe, down to the flowers beneath their feet.  This, too, had to be done: how it became possible for even the genius of a Shakespeare to get it done, I may with your leave hint to you hereafter.  Why it was not given to the Greeks to do it, I know not.

Let us at least thank them for what they did.  One work was given them, and that one they fulfilled as it had never been fulfilled before; as it will never need to be fulfilled again; for the Greeks’ work was done not for themselves alone but for all races in all times; and Greek Art is the heirloom of the whole human race; and that work was to assert in drama, lyric, sculpture, music, gymnastic, the dignity of man—the dignity of man which they perceived for the most part with their intense æsthetic sense, through the beautiful in man.  Man with them was divine, inasmuch as he could perceive beauty and be beautiful himself.  Beauty might be physical, æsthetic, intellectual, moral.  But in proportion as a thing was perfect it revealed its own perfection by its beauty.  Goodness itself was a form—though the highest form—of beauty.  Καλος meant both the physically beautiful and the morally good; αἰσχρὸς both the ugly and the bad.

Out of this root-idea sprang the whole of that Greek sculpture, which is still, and perhaps ever will be, one of the unrivalled wonders of the world.

Their first statues, remember, were statues of the gods.  This is an historic fact.  Before b.c. 580 there were probably no statues in Greece save those of deities.  But of what form?  We all know that the usual tendency of man has been to represent his gods as more or less monstrous.  Their monstrosity may have been meant, as it was certainly with the Mexican idols, and probably those of the Semitic races of Syria and Palestine, to symbolise the ferocious passions which they attributed to those objects of their dread, appeasable alone by human sacrifice.  Or the monstrosity, as with the hawk-headed or cat-headed Egyptian idols, the winged bulls of Nineveh and Babylon, the many-handed deities of Hindostan—merely symbolised powers which could not, so the priest and the sculptor held, belong to mere humanity.  Now, of such monstrous forms of idols, the records in Greece are very few and very ancient—relics of an older worship, and most probably of an older race.  From the earliest historic period, the Greek was discerning more and more that the divine could be best represented by the human; the tendency of his statuary was more and more to honour that divine, by embodying it in the highest human beauty.

In lonely mountain shrines there still might linger, feared and honoured, dolls like those black virgins, of unknown antiquity, which still work wonders on the European continent.  In the mysterious cavern of Phigalia, for instance, on the Eleatic shore of Peloponnese, there may have been in remote times—so the legend ran—an old black wooden image, a woman with a horse’s head and mane, and serpents growing round her head, who held a dolphin in one hand and a dove in the other.  And this image may have been connected with old nature-myths about the marriage of Demeter and Poseidon—that is, of encroachments of the sea upon the land; and the other myths of Demeter, the earth-mother, may have clustered round the place, till the Phigalians were glad—for it was profitable as well as honourable—to believe that in their cavern Demeter sat mourning for the loss of Proserpine, whom Pluto had carried down to Hades, and all the earth was barren till Zeus sent the Fates, or Iris, to call her forth, and restore fertility to the world.  And it may be true—the legend as Pausanias tells it 600 years after—that the old wooden idol having been burnt, and the worship of Demeter neglected till a famine ensued, the Phigalians, warned by the Oracle of Delphi, hired Onatas, a contemporary of Polygnotus and Phidias, to make them a bronze replica of the old idol, from some old copy and from a dream of his own.  The story may be true.  When Pausanias went thither, in the second century after Christ, the cave and the fountain, and the sacred grove of oaks, and the altar outside, which was to be polluted with the blood of no victim—the only offerings being fruits and honey, and undressed wool—were still there.  The statue was gone.  Some said it had been destroyed by the fall of the cliff; some were not sure that it had ever been there at all.  And meanwhile Praxiteles had already brought to perfection (Paus. 1, 2, sec. 4) the ideal of Demeter, mother-like, as Heré—whom we still call Juno now—but softer-featured, and her eyes more closed.

And so for mother earth, as for the rest, the best representation of the divine was the human.  Now, conceive such an idea taking hold, however slowly, of a people of rare physical beauty, of acutest eye for proportion and grace, with opportunities of studying the human figure such as exist nowhere now, save among tropic savages, and gifted, moreover, in that as in all other matters, with that innate diligence, of which Mr. Carlyle has said, ‘that genius is only an infinite capacity of taking pains,’ and we can understand somewhat of the causes which produced those statues, human and divine, which awe and shame the artificiality and degeneracy of our modern so-called civilisation—we can understand somewhat of the reverence for the human form, of the careful study of every line, the storing up for use each scattered fragment of beauty of which the artist caught sight, even in his daily walks, and consecrating it in his memory to the service of him or her whom he was trying to embody in marble or in bronze.  And when the fashion came in of making statues of victors in the games, and other distinguished persons, a new element was introduced, which had large social as well as artistic results.  The sculptor carried his usual reverence into his careful delineation of the victor’s form, while he obtained in him a model, usually of the very highest type, for perfecting his idea of some divinity.  The possibility of gaining the right to a statue gave a fresh impulse to all competitors in the public games, and through them to the gymnastic training throughout all the states of Greece, which made the Greeks the most physically able and graceful, as well as the most beautiful people known to the history of the human race.  A people who, reverencing beauty, reverenced likewise grace or acted beauty, so utterly and honestly, that nothing was too humble for a free man to do, if it were not done awkwardly and ill.  As an instance, Sophocles himself—over and above his poetic genius, one of the most cultivated gentlemen, as well as one of the most exquisite musicians, dancers, and gymnasts, and one of the most just, pious, and gentle of all Greece—could not, by reason of the weakness of his voice, act in his own plays, as poets were wont to do, and had to perform only the office of stage-manager.  Twice he took part in the action, once as the blind old Thamyris playing on the harp, and once in his own lost tragedy, the ‘Nausicaa.’  There in the scene in which the Princess, as she does in Homer’s ‘Odyssey,’ comes down to the sea-shore with her maidens to wash the household clothes, and then to play at ball—Sophocles himself, a man then of middle age, did the one thing he could do better than any there—and, dressed in women’s clothes, among the lads who represented the maidens, played at ball before the Athenian people.