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rough-hew like a Cyclops, but that he could not finish like a Praxiteles; that he was more capable of sketching in an outline than of filling up its parts. Fortunately we possess the means of laying bare the misconception upon which these complaints are founded. There still remains one, but only one, of his colossal works entire. The Oresteia is sufficient to prove that we gain no insight into his method as an artist if we consider only single plays. He thought and wrote in Trilogies. Sophocles, with whom it is usual to compare Eschylus, somewhat to the disadvantage of the latter, abandoned the large scale, the uncial letters, of the trilogy. Each separate Sophoclean drama is a studied whole. In order to do Eschylus the very barest justice, we ought therefore to contrast, not the Agamemnon alone, but the entire Oresteia with the Edipus or the Antigone. It will then be seen that the one poet, designing colossi, gave to them the style and finish and the unity which suit a statue larger than life-size: the other, restricting himself within more narrow limits, was free to lavish labour on the slightest details of his model. Such elaboration, on the scale adopted by Eschylus, would have produced a bewildering and painful effect of complexity. The vast design which it was the artist's object to throw into the utmost possible relief, would inevitably have suffered from excess of finish.

Few dramatists have ventured, like Eschylus, to wield the chisel of a Titan, or to knead whole mountains into statues corresponding to the superhuman grandeur of their thought. Few indeed can have felt that this was their true province, that to this they had the thews and sinews adequate. He stands alone in his triumphant use of the large manner, and this solitude is prejudicial to his fame with students whose taste has been formed in the school of Sophocles. Surveying the long roll of illustrious tragedians, there is but one, until we come to Victor Hugo, in whom the Eschylean spirit found fresh incarnation: and he had fallen upon days disadvantageous to his full development; his life was cut short in its earliest bloom, and the conditions under which he had to work, obscure and outcast from society, were adverse to the highest production. This poet is our own Christopher Marlowe. Like Eschylus, Marlowe's imagination was at home in the illimitable; like Eschylus, he apprehended immaterial and elemental forces-lusts, ambitions, and audacities of soul-as though they were substantial entities, and gave them shape and form; like Eschylus, he was the master of a "mighty line," the maker of a new celestial music for his race, the founder and creator of an art which ruled his century, the mystagogue of pomps and pageants and things terrible and things superb in shrines unvisited by earlier poets of his age and clime; like Eschylus, he stands arraigned of emptiness, extravagance, and "sound and fury," because the scale on which he wrought was vast, because he set no verbal limit to the presentation of the passion or the thought in view. Comparing Eschylus to Marlowe is comparing the monarch of the pine forest to the sapling fir, the full-grown lion to the lion's whelp, the achievement of the hero to

the promise of the stripling. Yet Herakles in his cradle, when he strangled Hera's serpents, already revealed the firm hand and unflinching nerve of him who plucked the golden fruit of the Hesperides. Even so Marlowe's work betrays the style and spirit of a youthful Titan; it is the labour of a beardless Æschylus, the first-fruit of Apollo's laurelbough untimely burned, the libation of a consecrated priest who, while a boy, already stood "chin-deep in the Pierian flood." If we contrast the Supplices, which Eschylus can hardly have written before the age at which Marlowe died, with Tamburlaine, which was certainly produced before Marlowe was twenty-six, the most immature work of the Greek with the most immature work of the English dramatist, we obtain a standard for estimating the height to which the author of Faustus might, have grown if he had lived to write his Oresteia in the fullness of a vigorous maturity.

Much that has been described as Asiatic in the genius of Eschylus may be referred to what I have called his demiurgic force. No mere citation of Oriental similes will account for the impression of hugeness left upon our memory, for the images enormous as those of farthest Ind, yet shaped with true Hellenic symmetry, for the visions vast as those of Ezekiel, yet conveyed withal in rich and radiant Greek. The so-called Asiatic element in Eschylus was something which he held in common with the poets and the prophets of the East-a sense of life more mystic and more deep, a power to seize it and discover it more real and plastic, than is often given to the nations of the West. This determination toward the hitherto invisible, unshaped, and unbelieved, to which he must give form, and for which he would fain win credence, may possibly help to explain the absence of human love as a main motive in his tragedies. There is plenty of Ares-too much, indeed, unless we recollect that the poet was a man of Marathon-but of Aphrodite nothing in his inspiration. It would seem that this passion, which formed the theme of Euripides' best work, and which Sophocles in the Antigone used to enhance the tragic situation brought about through the self-will of the heroine, had no attraction for Eschylus. Among the fragments of his plays there is indeed one passage in which he speaks of Love as a cosmical force, controlling the elemental powers of heaven and earth, and producing the flocks and fruits which sustain mortal life. The lines in question are put into the mouth of Aphrodite. The lost Myrmidones, again, described the love of Achilles for Patroclus, which Æschylus seems to have portrayed with a strength of passion that riveted the attention of antiquity. The plot of the Supplices, in like manner, implies the lawless desire of the sons of Egyptus for the daughters of Danaus; and the adultery of Clytemnestra with Ægisthus lies in the background of the Agamemnon. But of love, in the more romantic modern sense of the word, we find no trace either in the complete plays or in the fragments of Eschylus. It lay, perhaps, too close at hand for him to care to choose it as the theme of tragic poetry; and had he so selected it, he

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could hardly have avoided dwelling on its aberrations. feeling of the Greeks about love, as well as his own temper, would have made this necessary. It did not occur to the Greeks to separate love in its healthy and simple manifestations by any sharp line of demarcation from the other emotions of humanity. The brotherly, filial, and wifely feelings, those which owe their ascendancy to use and to the sanctities of domestic life, appeared in their eyes more important than the affection of youth for maid unwedded. When love ceased to be the expression on the one side of a physical need, and on the other the binding tie which kept the family together, the Greeks regarded it as a disease, a madness. Plato, who treated it with seriousness, classed it among the púviai: and Euripides portrayed it as a god-sent curse on Phædra. Viewed in this light, it may be urged that the love of Zeus for Io, in the Prometheus, set forth a passion which became an unbearable burden and source of misery to its victim; but of what we understand by love, there is here in reality no question. The tale of Io rather resembles the survival of some mystic Oriental myth of incarnation.

The organic vitality which Eschylus, by the exercise of his creative power, communicated to the structure of his tragedies, is further noticeable in his power of conducting a drama without prologue and without narration. In Æschylus, the information which is necessary in order to place the spectators at the proper point of view, is conveyed as part of the action. He does not, like Euripides, compose a formal and preliminary speech, or, like Shakspeare, introduce two or three superfluous characters in conversation. In this respect the openings of the Prometheus, the Agamemnon, and the Eumenides are masterpieces of the most consummate art. Not only are we plunged in medias res, without the slightest sacrifice of clearness; but the spectacle presented to our imagination is stirring in the highest degree. The fire has leapt from mountain peak to peak until at last it blazes on the watchman's eyes; Hephaestus and his satellites are actually engaged in nailing down the Titan to his bed of pain; the Furies are slumbering within the sacred Delphian shrine, and the ghost of Clytemnestra moves among them, rousing each in turn from her deep trance. Euripides, proceeding less by immediate vision than by patient thought, prefixed a monologue, which contained a programme of preccdling events, and prepared the spectator for what would follow in the play. These narratives are often frigid, and not unfrequently are placed, without propriety, in the mouth of one of the actors. We feel that a wholly detached prologue would have been more artistic.

The same is true about the speeches of the Messenger. The art of Eschylus was far too highly organized to be obliged to have recourse to such rude methods. It is true that, when he pleased, as in the Perse, he gave the principal part to the Messenger. The actors in that play are little better than spectators; and the same may be said about the Seven against Thebes. But the Messenger, though employed as here

for special purposes, was no integral part of his dramatic machinery; nor did he ever commit the decisive event of the drama to narration. His masterstroke as a dramatic poet-the cry of Agamemnon, following close upon the prophecies of Cassandra, and breaking the silence like a clap of doom, in that awful moment when the scene is left empty and the Chorus tremble with the apprehension of a coming woe-wouldprobably have yielded in the hands of Euripides to the speech of a servant. It was not that the later poet would not willingly have employed every means in his power for stirring the emotions of his audience; but he had not the creative imagination of his predecessor; he could not grasp his subject as a whole so perfectly as to dispense with artificial and mechanical devices. He fell back therefore upon narrative, in which he was a supreme master.

Equally remarkable from this point of view is the Eschylean treatment of the Chorus. It is never really separated from the action of the play. In the Prometheus, for example, the Oceanidæ actually share the doom of the protagonist. In the Supplices the daughters of Danaus may be termed the protagonist: for upon them converges the whole interest of the drama. In the Seven against Thebes the participation of the Chorus in the fate of the chief actors is proved by half of them siding with Ismene and the other half with Antigone at the conclusion. In the Perse they represent the nation which has suffered through the folly of Xerxes. In the Agamemnon the elders of Mycenæ assume an attitude directly hostile to Ægisthus and Clytemnestra. In the Choephora the women who sympathise with Electra further the scheme of Orestes by putting Ægisthus off the track of danger and sending him unarmed to meet his murderers. In the Eumenides the Furies play a part at least equal in importance to that of Orestes. They, like the protagonist, stand before the judgment-seat of Pallas and accept the verdict of the Areiopagus. Thus, in each of the extant plays of Eschylus, even the Chorus, which was subsequently so far separated from the action as to become a mere commentator and spectator, is vitally important in the conduct of the drama. Euripides by formalizing the several elements of the tragic art, by detaching the Chorus, introducing a prologue, and expanding the functions of the Messenger, sacrificed that higher kind of unity which we admire in the harmonious working of complex parts. What he gained was the opportunity of concentrating attention upon the conflict of motives, occasions for the psychological analysis of character, and scope for ethical reflection and rhetorical description.

I have hitherto been occupied by what appear to me the essential features of the genius of Eschylus-its demiurgic faculty of creativeness, and its capacity of dealing with heroic rather than merely human forms. To pass to the consideration of his theology would at this point be natural and easy. I do not, however, wish to dwell on what is called the prophetic aspect of his tragedy at present. It is enough to say that, here, as in the sphere of pure art, he was in the truest sense creative,

Without exactly removing the old landmarks, he elevated the current conception of Zeus regarded as the supreme deity, and introduced a novel life and depth of meaning into the moral fabric of the Greek religion. Much as he rejoiced in the delineation of Titanic and primeval powers, he paid but slight attention to the minor gods of the Pantheon; his creed was monotheism detached upon a pantheistic background, to which the forms of polytheism gave variety and colour. Zeus was all in all for Eschylus far more than for his predecessors, Homer and Hesiod. The most remarkable point about the Eschylean theology is, that in spite of its originality it seems to have but little affected the substance of serious Greek thought. Plato, for example, talks of Prometheus in the Protagoras as if no new conception of his character had been revealed to him by Eschylus. We are not therefore justified in regarding the dramatic poet as in any strict sense a prophet, and the oracles which he uttered are chiefly valuable as indications of his own peculiar ways of thinking; nor ought we, even so, perhaps, to demand from schylus too much consistency. The Supplices, for instance, cannot without due reservation be used to illustrate the Prometheus; since the dramatic situation in the two tragedies is so different as to account for any apparent divergence of opinion. There is, however, one point in the morality of Aschylus concerning fate and freewill which calls for special comment, since we run a danger here of doing real violence to his art by overstating some one theory about his supposed philosophical intention. I allude of course to his conception of Destiny. If we adopt the fatalistic explanation of Greek tragedy propounded by Schlegel, we can hardly avoid coarsening and demoralising fables which owe their interest not to the asphyxiating force of destiny, but to the action and passion of human beings. If, on the other hand, we overstrain the theological doctrine of Nemesis, we run a risk of trying to find sermons in works of art, and of exaggerating the importance of details which support our favourite hypothesis. It should never be forgotten that whatever view we take of the moral and religious purpose of Greek tragedy, has been gained by subsequent analysis. It was not in any case present to the consciousness of the poet as a necessary condition of his art as art. His first business was to provide for the dramatic presentation of his subject: his philosophy, whether ethical or theological, transpired in the heat and stress of production, not because he sought to give it deliberate expression, but because it formed an integral part of the fabric of his mind. Eschylus firmly believed in the indissoluble connection between acts and consequences. "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap," "the fathers have eaten a sour grape and the children's teeth are set on edge," formed the groundwork of his view of human life. This sort of fatalism he coloured with religious theories adopted from the antique theology of his race, but strongly moralized, and developed in the light of his own reason. Much of elder superstition, therefore, clings about his ethics, and an awful

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