Part 11

You must, of course, always allow for a personal equation in the viewpoint of any critic: you must here weight the "natural superhuman diction" against the "stiff magnificence" Professor Murray attributes to Aeschylus; and get a wise and general view of your own. What I want you to see clearly is, the descent of the influx from plane to plane, as shown in these two tragedians. The aim of the first is to express a spiritual message, grand thought. That of the second is to produce a work of flawless beauty, without regard to its spiritual import. What was to Aeschylus a secondary object; the purely artistic--was to Sophocles the whole thing. Aeschylus was capable of wonderful psychological insight. Clytemnestra's speech to the Chorus, just before Agamemnon's return, is a perfect marvel in that way. But the tremendous movement, the August impersonal atmosphere as

".... gorgeous Tragedy In sceptered pall comes sweeping by."

--divests it of the personal, and robes it in a universal symbolic significance: because he has built like a titan, you do not at first glance note that he has labored like a goldsmith, as someone has said. But in Sophocles the goldsmithry is plain to see. His character-painting is exquisite: pathetic often; just and beautiful almost always. I put in the almost in view of that about the "hard unloveliness" of Electra's "daily wrangles" with her mother. The mantle of the religious Egyptians had fallen on Aeschylus: but Sophocles' garb was the true fashionable Athenian chiton of his day. He was personal, where the other had been impersonal; faultless, where the other had been sublime; conventionally orthodox, where through Aeschylus had surged the super-credal spirit of universal prophecy.

And then we come to third of the trio: Euripides, born in 480. "He was," says Professor Murray, "essentially representative of his age, yet apparently in hostility to it; almost a failure of the stage--he won only four prizes in fifty years of production-- yet far the most celebrated poet in Greece." Athens hated, jeered at, and flouted him just as much as she honored and adored Sophocles; yet you know what happened to those Athenian captives at Syracuse who could recite Euripides. Where, in later Greek writings, we come on quotations from the other two once or twice, we come on quotations from Euripides dozens of times. The very fact that eighteen of his plays survive, to seven each of Aeschylus' and Sophocles', is proof of his larger and longer popularity.

He had no certain message from the Gods, as Aeschylus had; his intensely human heart and his mighty intellect kept him from being the 'flawless artist' that Sophocles was. He questioned all conventional ideas, and would not let the people rest in comfortable fat acquiescence. He came to make men 'sit up and think.' He did not solve problems, but raised them, and flung them at the head of the world. He must stir and probe things to the bottom; and his recurrent unease, perhaps, mars the perfection of his poetry. Admetus is to die, unless someone will die for him; recollect that for the Greekish mob, death was the worst of all possible happenings. Alcestis his wife will die for him; and he accepts her sacrifice. Now, that was the old saga; and in Greek conventional eyes, it was all right. Woman was an inferior being, anyhow; there was nothing more fitting that Alcestis should die for her lord.--Here let me make a point plain: you cannot look back through Greece to a Golden Age in Greece; it is not like Egypt, where the farther you go into the past, the greater things you come to;--although in Egypt, too, there would have been rises and falls of civilization. In Homer's days, in Euripides', they had these barbarous ideas about women; and these foolish exoteric ideas about death; historic Greece, like modern Europe from the Middle Ages, rises from a state of comparative barbarism, lightlessness; behind which, indeed, there were rumors of a much higher Past. These great Greeks, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, brought in ideas which were as old as the hills in Egypt, or in India; but which were new to the Greece of their time--of historic times; they were, I think, as far as their own country was concerned, innovators and revealers; not voicers of a traditional wisdom; it may have been traditional once, but that time was much too far back for memory. I think we should have to travel over long, long ages, to get to a time when Eleusis was a really effective link with the Lodge--to a period long before Homer, long before Troy fell.--But to return to the story of Alcestis:--

You might take it on some lofty impersonal plane, and find a symbol in it; Aeschylus would have done so, somehow; though I do not quite see how. Sophocles would have been aware of nothing wrong in it; he would have taken it quite as a matter of course. Euripides saw clearly that Admetus was a selfish poltroon, and rubbed it in for all he was worth. And he could not leave it at that, either; but for pity's sake must bring in Hercules at the end to win back Alcestis from death. So the play is great-hearted and tender, and a covert lash for conventional callousness; and somehow does not quite hang together:--leaves you just a little uncomfortable. Browning calls him, in _Balaustion's Adventure,_

".... Euripides The human, with his droppings of warms tears";

--it is a just verdict, perhaps. Without Aeschylus' Divine Wisdom, or Sophocles' worldly wisdom, he groped perpetually after some means to stay the downward progress of things; he could not thunder like the one, nor live easily and let live, like the other.--I do not give you these scraps of criticism (which are not my own, but borrowed always I think), for the sake of criticism; but for the sake of history;--understand them, and you have the story of the age illumined. You can read the inner Athens here, in the aspirations and in the limitations of Euripides, and in the contempt in which Athens held him; as you can read it in the grandeur of Aeschylus, and the Athenian acceptance of, and then reaction against, him; and in the character of Sophocles and his easy relations with his age. When Euripides came, the light of the Gods had gone. He was blindish; he would not accept the Gods without question. Yet was he on the side of the Gods whom he could not see or understand; we must count him on their side, and loved by them. He was not panoplied, like Aeschylus or Milton, in their grim and shining armor; yet what armor he wore bore kindred proud dints from the hellions' batterings. Or perhaps mostly he wore such marks as wounds upon his own flesh. . . . Not even a total lack of humor, which I suppose must be attributed to him, can make him appear less than a most sympathetic, an heroic figure. He was the child and fruitage and outcast of his age, belonging as much to an Athens declining and inwardly hopeless, as did Aeschylus (at first) to Athens in her early glory. He was not so much bothered (like Sophocles) with no message, as bothered with the fact that he had no clear and saving message. His realism--for compared with the other two, he was a sort of realist--was the child of his despair; and his despair, of the atmosphere of his age.

He was, or had been, in close touch with Socrates (you might expect it); lived a recluse somewhat, taking no part in affairs; married twice, unfortunately both times; and his family troubles were among the points on which gentlemanly Athens sneered at him. A lovely lyricist, a restless thinker; tender-hearted; sublime in pity of all things weak and helpless and defeated:--women especially, and conquered nations. Prof. Murray says:

"In the last plays dying Athens is not mentioned, but her death- struggle and her sins are constantly haunting us; the Joy of battle is mostly gone; the horror of war is left. Well might old Aeschylus pray, 'God grant that I may sack no city!' if the reality of conquest is what it appears in the last plays of Euripides. The conquerors there are as miserable as the conquered; only more cunning, and perhaps more wicked."

He died the year before Aegospotami, at the court of Archelaus of Macedon. One is glad to think he found peace and honor at last. Athens heard with a laugh that some courtier there had insulted him; and with astonishment that the good barbarous Archelaus had handed said courtier over to Euripides to be scourged for his freshness. I don't imagine that Euripides scourged him though-to amount to anything.

VI. SOCRATES AND PLATO

By this time you should have seen, rather than any picture of Greece and Athens in their heyday, an indication of certain universal historical laws. As thus (to go back a little): an influx of the Spirit is approaching, and a cycle of high activities is about to begin. A great war has cleared off what karmic weight has been hanging over Athens;--Xerxes, you will remember, burnt the town. Hence there is a clearness in the inner atmosphere; through which a great spiritual voice may, and does, speak a great spiritual message. But human activities proceed, ever increasing their momentum, until the atmosphere is no longer clear, but heavy with the effluvia of by no means righteous thought and action. The Spirit is no more visibly present, but must manifest if at all through a thicker medium; and who speaks now, speaks as artist only,--not as poet--or artist-prophet. Time goes on, and the inner air grows still thicker; till men live in a cloud, through which truths are hardly to be seen. Then those who search for the light are apt to cry out in despair; they become realists struggling to break the terrible molds of thought:--and if you can hear the Spiritual in them at all, it is not in a positive message they have for men, but in the greatness of their heart and compassion. They do not build; they seek only to destroy. There seems nothing else for them to do.

So in England, Wordsworth opened this last cycle of poetry; coming when there was a clear atmosphere, and speaking more or less clearly through it his message from the Gods. You hear a like radiant note of hope in Shelley; and something of it in Keats, who stood on the line that divides the Poet-Prophet from the Poet-Artist. Then you come to the ascendency of Tennyson, whose business in life was to be the latter. He tried the role of prophet; he lived up to the highest he could: strove towards the light much more gallantly than did Sophocles, his Athenian paradigm. But the atmosphere of his age made him something of a failure at it: no clear light was there for him to find, such as could manifest through poetry. Then you got men like Matthew Arnold with his cry of despair, and William Morris with his longing for escape; then the influence of Realism. So many poets recently have an element of Euripides in them; a will to do well, but a despair of the light; a tendency to question everything, but little power to find answers to their questions. Then there were some few who, influenced (consciously or not) by H.P. Blavatsky, that great dawn-herald, caught glimpses of the splendor of a dawn--which yet we wait for.

Euripides, with the Soul stirring within and behind him, "broke himself on the bars of life and poetry," as Professor Murray says. He was so hemmed in by the emanations of the time that he could never clearly enunciate the Soul. Not, at any rate, in an unmixed way, and with his whole energies. Perhaps his favorite device of a _Deus ex Machina_--like Hercultes in the _Alcestis_ --is a symbolical enunciation of it, and intended so to be. Perhaps the cause of the unrest he makes us feel is this: he knew that the highest artistic method was the old Aeschylean symbolic one, and tried to use it; but at the same time was compelled by the gross emanations of the age, which he was not quite strong enough to rise above, to treat his matter not symbolically, but realistically. He could not help saying: "Here is the epos you Athenians want me to treat,--that my artist soul forces me to treat; here are the ideas that make up your conventional religion;--now look at them!" And forth-with he showed them, in there exoteric side, sordid, ugly and bloody;-- and then, on the top of that showing, tried to twist them round to the symbolic impersonal plane again; and so left a discord not properly solved, an imperfect harmony; a sense of loss rather than gain; of much torn down, and nothing built up to take its place. The truth was that the creative forces had flowed downward until the organs of spiritual vision were no longer open; and poetry and art, the proper vehicles of the higher teaching in any age approximately golden, could no longer act as efficient channels for the light.

To turn to England again: Tennyson was, generally speaking, most successful when most he was content to be merely the artist in words, and least so when he assumed the office of Teacher; because almost all he found to teach was brain-mind scientific stuff; which was what the age called for, and the desired diet of Mid-Victorian England. Carlyle, who was a far greater poet essentially, and a far greater teacher actually, fitted himself to an age when materialism had made unpoetic; and eschewed poetry and had no use for it; and would have had others eschew it also. In our own time we have realists like Mr. Masefield. They are called realists because they work on the plane which has come, in the absence of anything spiritual, to seem that of the realities; the region of outside happenings, of the passions in all their ugly nakedness, of sorrow, misery, and despair. Such men may be essentially noble; we may read in them, under all the ugliness and misery they write down, just one quality of the Soul;--its unrest in and distaste for those conditions; but the mischief of it is that they make the sordidness seem the reality; and the truth about them is that their outlook and way of writing are simply the result of the blindness of the Soul;--its temporary blindness, not its essential glory. But the true business of Poetry never changes; it is to open paths into the inner, the beautiful, the spiritual world.

Just when things were coming to this pass H. P. Blavatsky went to England; and though she did not touch the field of creative literature herself, brought back as you know a gleam of light and beauty into poetry that may yet broaden out and redeem it. She was born when the century was thirty-one years old; and, curiously enough, there was a man born in Attica about 469, or when _his_ century was thirty-one years old, who, though he did not himself touch the field of literature, was the cause why that light rose to shine in it which has shone most brilliantly since all down the ages; that light which we could not afford to exchange even for the light of Aeschylus. If one of the two were about to be taken from us, and we had our choice which it should be, we should have to cry, _Take Aeschylus, but leave us this!_ --Ay, and take all other Greek literature into the bargain!--But to return to the man born in 469.

He was the son of humble people; his father was a stone-cutter in a small way of business; his mother a midwife. He himself began life as a sculptor,--a calling, in its lower reaches, not so far above that of his father. A group of the Graces carved by him was still to be seen on the road to the Acropolis two hundred years after; and they did not adorn Athens with mean work, one may guess; the Athens of Pericles and Pheidias. But, successful or not, he seems soon to have given it up. Of his youth we know very little. Spintharus, one of the few that knew him then and also when he had become famous, said that he was a man of terrible passions: anger hardly to be governed, and vehement desires; "though," he added, "he never did anything unfair." * By 'unfair' you may understand 'not fitting'--a transgression of right action. He set out to master himself: a tremendous and difficult realm to master.

* Gilbert Murray: _Ancient Greek Literature_ ------

We hardly begin to know him till he was growing old; and then he was absolute monarch of that realm. We do not know when he abandoned his art; or how long it was before he had won some fame as a public teacher. We catch glimpse of him as a soldier: from 432 to 429 he served at the siege of Potidaea; at Delium in 424; and at Amphipolis in 422. Thus to do the hoplite, carrying a great weight of arms, at forty-seven, he needed to have some constitution; and indeed he had;--furthermore, he played the part with distinguished bravery--though wont to fall at times into inconvenient fits of abstraction. Beyond all this, for the outside of the man, we may say that he was of fascinating, extreme and satyr-like ugliness and enormous sense of humor; that he was a perpetual joke to the comic poets, and to himself; an old fellow of many and lovable eccentricities; and that you cannot pick one little hole in his character, or find any respect in which he does not call for love.

And men did love him; and he them. He saw in the youth of Athens, whose lives so often were being wasted, Souls with all the beautiful possibilities of Souls; and loved them as such, and drew them towards their soulhood. Such love and insight is the first and strongest weapon of the Teacher: who sees divinity within the rough-hewn personalities of men as the sculptor sees the God within the marble; and calls it forth. He was wont to joke over his calling; his mother, said he, had been a midwife, assisting at the birth of men's bodies; he himself was a midwife of souls. How he drew men to him--of the power he had--let Alcibiades bear witness. "As for myself," says Alcibiades, "were I not afraid you would think me more drunk than I am, I would tell you on oath how his words have moved me--ay, and how they move me still. When I listen to him my heart beats with a more than Corybantic excitement; he has only to speak and my tears flow. Orators, such as Pericles, never moved me in this way-- never roused my soul to the thought of my servile condition: but this man makes me think that life is not worth living so long as I am what I am. Even now, if I were to listen, I could not resist. So there is nothing for me but to stop my ears against this siren's song and fly for my life, that I may not grow old sitting at his feet. No one would ever think that I had shame in me; but I am ashamed in the presence of Socrates."

Poor Alciabes! whom Socrates loved so well, and tried so hard to save; and who could only preserve his lower nature for its own and for his city's destruction by stopping his ears against his Teacher! Alcibiades, whose genius might have saved Athens... only Athens would not be saved... and he could not have saved her, because he had stopped his ears against the man who made him ashamed; and because his treacherous lower nature was always there to thwart and overturn the efficacy of his genius;--what a picture of duality it is!

Socrates gave up his art; because art was no longer useful as an immediate lever for the age. He knew poetry well, but insisted, as Professor Murray I think says, on always treating it as the baldest of prose. There was poetry about, galore; and men did not profit by it: something else was needed. His mission was to the Athens of his day; he was going to save Athens if he could. So he went into the marketplace, the agora, and loafed about (so to say), and drew groups of young men and old about him, and talked to them. The Delphic Oracle had made pronouncement: _Sophocles is wise; Euripides is wiser; but Socrates is the wisest of mankind._ Sometimes, you see, the Delphic Oracle could get off a distinctly good thing. But Socrates, with his usual sense of humor, had never considered himself in that light at all; oldish, yes; and funny, and ugly, by all means;--but wise! He thought at first, he used to say, that the Oracle must be mistaken, or joking; for Athens was full of reputed wise men, sophists and teachers of philosophy like Prodicus and Protagoras; whereas he himself, heaven knew--. Well, he would go out and make a trial of it. So he went, and talked, and probed the wisdom of his fellow-citizens; and slowly came round to the belief that after all the Delphic Oracle might not have been such a fool. For he knew his ignorance; but the rest were ignorant without knowing it. This was his own way of telling the story; and you can never be sure how much camouflage was in it;--and yet, too, he was a giant humorist. Anyhow, he did show men their ignorance; and you all know his solemn way of doing it. He drew them on with sly questionings to see what idiots they were; and then drew them on with more sly questionings to perceive at least a few sound ethical truths.

He took that humble patient means of saving Athens: by breaking down false opinions and instilling true ones. It was beginning quite at the bottom of things. Where we advertise a public lecture, he button-holed a passer-by; and by the great power of his soul won a following presently. To rouse up a desire for right living in the youth of Athens: if he could do that, thought he, he might save Athens for the world. I wonder what the cycles of national glory would come to, how long they might last, if only the Teachers that invade to save them could have their way. Always we see the same picture: the tremendous effort of the Gods to redeem these nations in the times of their creative greatness; to lift them on to a spiritual plane, that the greatness may not wane and become ineffective. There is the figure that stands before the world, about whose perfection or whose qualities you may wrangle if you will; he is great; he is wonderful; he stirs up love and animosity;--but behind him are the Depths, the Hierarchies, the Pantheons. Socrates' warning Voice, the Daimon that counseled him in every crisis, has always been a hard nut for critics to crack. He was an impostor, was he? Away with you for a double fool! His life meets you so squarely at every point; there was no atom in his being that knew how to fear or lie.... Well, no; but he was deluded; he mistook--. Man, there is more value in the light word of Socrates affirming, than in a whole world full of evidence denying, of such maunderers as you! See here; he was the most sensible of men; balanced; keeping his head always;--a mind no mood or circumstances could deflect from rational self-control, either towards passion or ecstasy. One explanation remains--as in the case of Joan, or of H.P. Blavatsky;--he was neither deceiving nor deceived, but what he claimed to hear, he did hear; and it was the voice of One that stood behind him, and might not appear in history at all, or in the outer world at all: a greater than he, and his Teacher; whose bodily presence might have been in Greece the while, or anywhere else. How dare we pretend, because we can do a few things with a piston or a crucible, that we know the limits of natural and spiritual law?