Literary and General Lectures and Essays - Charles Kingsley 2 стр.

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:

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 PoseidonNeptune, as the Romans call himwho gave their forefathers the horse; and something morethe shipthe horse of the sea, as they, like the old Norse Vikings after them, delighted to call it

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 actionfor such is the meaning of the wordis going on upon the stage, to be commented on by the sympathising Chorus?

One drama, at least, was acted in Athens in that year440 B.C.which you, I doubt not, know wellAntigone, that 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 aught 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 days 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 fairyland 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 understandhow 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 Schlegeluttering thus a deep and momentous truththe 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.  That man is made in the likeness of Godis 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 theoriesas I holdhave 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 racesave that of the Jews, and perhaps of our own Teutonic forefathersdid 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 main without a parallel likewise.

Take, as an example, the figure which you know bestthe figure of Antigone herselfdevoting herself to be entombed alive, 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 depth 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:

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 farther 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 seems 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 thick-soled 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 playhouse 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 itselfa 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 spectators 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 dramaespecially with the highest form of itour 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 manthe 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 formthough the highest formof beauty.  Καλος meant both the physically beautiful and the morally good; αισχρος 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 Hindostanmerely 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 ancientrelics 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 timesso the legend ranan old black wooden image, a woman with a horses 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 Poseidonthat 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 gladfor it was profitable as well as honourableto 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 truethe legend as Pausanias tells it 600 years afterthat 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 drama 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 victimthe only offerings being fruits and honey, and undressed woolwere 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 Heréwhom we still call Juno nowbut 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 inmate 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 civilisationwe 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 victors 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 himselfover 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 Greececould 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 Homers Odyssey, comes down to the sea-shore with her maidens to wash the household clothes, and then to play at ballSophocles himself, a man then of middle age, did the one thing he could do better than any thereand, dressed in womens clothes, among the lads who represented the maidens, played at ball before the Athenian people.