Part 8

You remember how the latter, being tyrant of Samos, applied to Amasis of Egypt for an alliance. But wary Amasis, noting his invariable good luck, advised him to sacrifice something, lest the Gods should grow jealous: so Polycrates threw a ring into the sea, with the thought thus to appease Nemesis cheaply; but an obliging fish allowed itself to be caught and served up for his supper with the ring in its internal economy; on hearing of which, wary Amasis foresaw trouble, and declined the alliance with thanks. Such views or feelings had come to be Greek orthodoxy; you may take it that whatever Pindar said was not far from the orthodoxies--hence his extreme popularity: we dearly love a man who tells us grandly what we think ourselves, and think it right to think. But such a position would not do for Aeschylus. He noted his doctrine only to condemn it.

"There live an old saw framed in ancient days In memories of men, that high estate, Full grown, brings forth its young, nor childless dies, But that from good success Springs to the race a woe insatiable. But I, apart from all, Hold this my creed alone: Ill deeds along bring forth offspring of ill Like to their parent stock."

Needless to say the translation--Dean Plumptre's in the main-- fails to bring out the force of the original.

We must remember that for his audiences the story he had to tell was not the important thing. They knew it in advance; it was one of their familiar legends. What they went to hear was Aeschylus' treatment of it; his art, his poetry, his preaching. That was what was new to them: the thing for which their eyes and ears were open. We go to the theater, as we read novels, for amusement; the Athenians went for aesthetic and religious ends. So Aechylus had ready for him an efficient pulpit; and was not suspect for using it. We like Movies shows because they are entertaining and exciting; the Athenian would have damned them because they are inartistic.

I said, he had a pulpit ready for him; yet, as nearly as such a statement can come to truth, it was he himself who invented the drama. It was, remember, an age of transition: things were passing out from the inner planes: the Mysteries were losing their virtue. The Egyptian Mysteries had been dramatic in character; the Eleusinian, which were very likely borrowed or copied or introduced from Egypt, were no doubt dramatic too. Then there had been festivals among the rustics, chiefly in honor of Dionysos not altogether in his higher aspects, with rudimentary plays of a coarse buffoonish character. By 499, in Athens, these had grown to something more important; in that year the wooden scaffolding of the theater in which they were given broke down under the spectators; and this led to the building of a new theater in stone. It was in 499 Aeschylus first competed; the show was still very rudimentary in character. Then he went off to Sicily; and came back with the idea conceived of Greek Tragedy as an artistic vehicle or expression--and something more. He taught the men who had at first defeated him, how to do their later and better work; and opened the way for all who came after, from Sophocles to Racine. He took to sailing this new ship of the drama as near as he might to the shore-line of the Mysteries themselves;--indeed, he did much more than this; for he infused into his plays that wine of divine life then to be found in its purity and vigor only or chiefly in the Pythagorean Brotherhood.--And now as to this new art-form of his.

De Quincey, accepting the common idea that the Dionysian Theater was built to seat between thirty and forty thousand spectators (every free Athenian citizen), argues that the formative elements that made Greek Tragedy what it was were derived from these huge dimensions. In such a vast building (he asks) how could you produce such a play as _Hamlet?_--where the art of the actor shows itself in momentary changes of expression, small byplay that would be lost, and the like. The figures would be dwarfed by the distances; stage whispers and the common inflexions of the speaking voice would be lost. So none of these things belonged to Greek Tragedy. The mere physical scale necessitated a different theory of art. The stature of the actors had to be increased, or they would have looked like pygmies; their figures had to be draped and muffled, to hide the unnatural proportions thus given them. A mask had to be worn, if only to make the head proportionate to the body; and the mask had to contain an arrangement for multiplying the voice, that it might carry to the whole audience. That implied that the lines should be chanted, not spoken;--though in any case, chanted they would be, for they were verse, not prose; and the Greeks had not forgotten, as we have, that verse is meant to be chanted. So here, to begin with, the whole scheme implied something as unlike actual life as it well could be. And then, too, there was the solemnity of the occasion--the religious nature of the whole festival.

Thus, in substance De Quincey; who makes too little, perhaps, of the matter of that last sentence; and too much of what goes before. We may say that it was rather the grand impersonal theory of the art that created the outward condition; not the conditions that created the theory. Mahaffy went to Athens and measured the theater; and found it not so big by any means. They could have worked out our theories and practice in it, had they wanted to, so far as that goes. Coarse buffoonish country festivals do not of themselves evolve into grand art or solemn occasions; you must seek a cause for that evolution, and find it in an impulse arisen in some human mind. Or minds indeed; for such impulses are very mysterious. The Gods sow their seed in season; we do not see the sowing, but presently mark the greening of the brown earth. The method of the Mysteries--drama serious and religious--had been drifting outwards: things had been growing to a point where a great creative Soul could take hold of them and mold them to his wish. If Aeschylus was not an Initiate of Eleusis, he had learnt, with the Pythagoreans, the method of the Mysteries of all lands. He knew more, not less, than the common pillars of the Athenian Church and State. I imagine it was he, in those thirteen consecutive years of his victories, who in part created, in part drew from his Pythagorean knowledge, those conventions and circumstances for Tragedy which suited him--rather than that conventions already existing imposed formative limits on him. His genius was aloof, impersonal, severe, and of the substance of the Eternal; such as would need precisely those conventions, and must have created them had they not been there. Briefly, I believe that this is what happened. Sent by Pythagoras to do what he could for Athens and Greece, he forged this mighty bolt of tragedy to be his weapon.

The theory of modern drama is imitation of life. It has nothing else and higher to offer; so, when it fails to imitate, we call it trash. But the theory of Aeschylean Tragedy is the illumination of life. Illumination of life, through a medium quite unlike life. Art begins on a spiritual plane, and works down to realism in its decadence; then it ceases to be art at all, and becomes merely copying what we imagine to be nature,--nature, often, as seen through a diseased liver and well-atrophied pineal gland.

True art imitates nature only in a very selective and limited way. It chooses carefully what it shall imitate, and all to the end of illumination. It paints a flower, or a sunset, not to reproduce the thing seen with the eyes, but to declare and set forth that mood of the Oversoul which the flower or the sunset expressed. Flower-colors or sunset-colors cannot be reproduced in pigments; but you can do things with pigments and a brush that can tell the same story. Or it can be done in words, in a poem; or with the notes of music;--in both of which cases the medium used is still more, and totally, unlike the medium through which the Oversoul said its say in the sky or the blossom.

Nature is always expressing these moods of the Oversoul; but we get no news of them, as a rule, from our own sight and hearing; we must wait for the poets and artists to interpret them. Life is always at work to teach us life; but we miss the grand lessons, usually, until some human Teacher enforces them. His methods are the same as those of the artists: between whose office and his there was at first no difference;--_Bard_ means only, originally, an Adept Teacher. Such a one selects experiences out of life for his pupils, and illumines them through the circumstances under which they are applied; just as the true artist selects objects from nature, and by his manner of treating them, interprets the greatness that lies beyond.

So the drama-theory of Aeschylus. He took fragments of possible experience, and let them be seen through a heightened and interpretative medium; with a light at once intense and somber- portentous thrown on them; and this not to reproduce the externalia and appearance of life, but to illumine its inner recesses; to enforce, in plays lasting an hour or so, the lessons life may take many incarnations to teach. This cannot be done by realism, imitation or reproduction of the actual; than which life itself is always better.

What keeps us from seeing the meanings of life? Personality. Not only our own, but in all those about us. Personality dodges and flickers always between our eyes and the solemn motions, the adumbrations of the augustness beyond. We demand lots of personality in our drama; we call it character-drawing. We want to see fellows like ourselves lounging or bustling about, and hear them chattering as we do;--fellows with motives (like our own) all springing from the personality. Human life is what interests us: we desire to drink deep of it, and drink again and again. The music that we wish to hear is the "still, sad music of humanity";--that is, taking our theory at its best, and before you come down to sheer 'jazz' and ragtime. But what interested Aeschylus was that which lies beyond and within life. He said: 'You can get life in the Agora, on the Acropolis, any day of the week; when you come to the theater you shall have something else, and greater.'

So he set his scenes, either in a vast, remote, and mysterious antiquity, or--in _The Persians_--at Susa before the palace of the Great King: a setting as remote, splendid, vast, and mysterious, to the Greek mind of the day, as the other. Things should not be as like life, but as unlike life, as possible. The plays themselves, as acted, were a combination of poetry, dance, statuesque poses and motions and groupings; there was no action. All the action was done off the scenes. They did not portray the evolution of character; they hardly portrayed character--in the personal sense--at all. The _dramatis personae_ are types, symbols, the expression of natural forces, or principles in man. In our drama you have a line, an extension forward in time; a progression from this to that point in time;--in Greek Tragedy you have a cross-section of time--a cutting through the atom of time that glimpses may be caught of eternity. There was no unfoldment of a story; but the presentation of a single mood. In the chanted poetry and the solemn dance-movements a situation was set forth; what led up to it being explained retrospectively. The audience knew what was coming as well as the author did: that Agamemnon, for instance, was to be murdered. So all was written to play on their expectations, not on their surprise. There was a succession of perfect pictures; these and the poetry were to hold the interest, to work it up: to seize upon the people, and lead them by ever-heightening accessions of feeling into forgetfulness of their personal lives, and absorption in the impersonal harmony, the spiritual receptivity, from which the grand truths are visible. The actors' masks allowed only the facial expression of a single mood; and it was a single mood the dramatist aimed to produce: a unity; one great word. There could be no grave-diggers; no quizzing of Polonious; no clouds very like a whale. The whole drama is the unfoldment of a single moment: that, say, in which Hamlet turns on Caudius and kills him--rather, leads him out to kill him. To that you are led by a little sparse dialog, ominous enough, and pregnant with dire significance, between two or three actors; many long speeches in which the story is told in retrospect; much chanting by the chorus--Horatio multiplied by a dozen or so--to make you feel Hamlet's long indecision, and to allow you no escape from the knowledge that Claudius' crime would bring about its karmic punishment. It is a unity: one thunderbolt from Zeus;--first the growl and rumbling of the thunders; then the whirr of the dread missile,--and lo, the man dead that was to die. And through the bolt so hurled, so effective, and with it--the eagle-bark--Aeschylus crying _Karma!_ to the Athenians.

So it has been said that Aeschylean Tragedy is more nearly allied to sculpture; Shakespearean Tragedy to the Epic.

Think how that unchanging mask, that frozen moment of expression, would develop the quality of tragic irony. In it Clytemnestra comes out to greet the returning Agamemnon. She has her handmaids carpet the road for him with purple tapestries; she makes her speeches of welcome; she alludes to the old sacrifice of Iphigenia; she tells him how she has waited for his return;-- and all the while the audience knows she is about to kill him. They listen to her doubtful words, in which she reveals to them, who know both already, her faithlessness and dire purpose; but to her husband, seems to reveal something different altogether. With Agamemnon comes Cassandra from fallen Troy: whose fate was to foresee all woes and horror, and to forthtell what she saw-- and never to be believed; so now when she raises her dreadful cry, foreseeing what is about to happen, and uttering warning-- none believe her but the audience, who know it all in advance. And then there are the chantings of the chorus, a group of Argive elders. They know or guess how things stand between the queen and her lover; they express their misgiving, gathering as the play goes on; they recount the deeds of violence of which the House of Atreus has been the scene, and are haunted by the foreshadowings of Karma. But they many not understand or give credence to the warnings of Cassandra: Karma disallows fore-fending against the fall of its bolts. Troy has fallen, they say: and that was Karma; because Paris, and Troy in supporting him, had sinned against Zeus the patron of hospitality,--to whom the offense rose like vultures with rifled nest, wheeling in mid-heaven on strong oars of wings, screaming for retribution. --You may not that Aeschylus' freedom from the bonds of outer religion is like Shakespeare's own: here Zeus figures as symbol of the Lords of Karma; from him flow the severe readjustments of the Law;--but in the _Prometheus Bound_ he stands for the lower nature that crucifies the Higher.

Troy, then, had sinned, and has fallen; but (says the Chorus) let the conquerors look to it that they do not overstep the mark; let there be no dishonoring the native Gods of Troy; (the Athenians had been very considerably overstepping the mark in some of their own conquests recently;)--let there be no plundering or useless cruelty; (the Athenians had been hideously greedy and cruel;)--or Karma would overtake it own agents, the Greeks, who were not yet out of the wood, as we say--who had not yet returned home. This was when the beacons had announced the fall of Troy, and before the entry of Agamemnon.

Clytemnestra is not like Gertrude, but a much grander and more tragical figure. Shakespeare leaves you in no doubt as to his queen's relation to Claudius; he enlarges on their guilty passion _ad lib._ Aeschylus never mentions love at all in any of his extant plays; only barely hints at it here. It may be supposed to exist; it is an accessory motive; it lends irony to Clytemnestra's welcome to Agamemnon--in which only the audience and the Chorus are aware that the lady does protest too much. But she stands forth in her own eyes as an agent of Karma-Nemesis; there is something very terrible and unhuman about her. Early in the play she reminds the Chorus how Agamemnon, is setting out for Troy, sacrificed his and her daughter Iphigenia to get a fair wind: a deed of blood whose consequences must be feared--something to add to the Chorus's misgivings, as they chant their doubtful hope that the king may safely return. In reality Artemis had saved Igphigenia; and though Clytemnestra did not know this, in assuming the position of her daughter's avenger she put herself under the karmic ban. And Agamemnon did not know it: he had intended the sacrifice: and was therefore, and for his supposed ruthlessness at Troy, under the same ban himself. Hence the fate that awaited him on his return; and hence because of Clytemnestra's useless crime--when she and Aegisthos come out from murdering him, and announce what they have done, the Chorus's dark foretellings--to come true presently --of the Karma that is to follow upon it.

And here we must guard ourselves against the error--as I think it is that Aeschylus set himself to create the perfect and final art-form as such. I think he was just intent on announcing Karma to the Athenians in the most effective way possible: bent all his energies to making that--and that the natural result of that high issue clear and unescapable; purpose was this marvelous art-form--which Sophocles took up later, and in some external ways perhaps perfected. Then came Aristotle after a hundred years, and defining the results achieved, tried to make Shakespeare impossible. The truth is that when you put yourself to do the Soul's work, and have the great forces of the Soul to back you therein, you create an art-form; and it only remains for the Aristotelian critic to define it. Then back comes the Soul after a thousand years, makes a new one, and laughs at the Aristotles. The grand business is done by following the Soul--not by conforming to rules or imitating models. But it must be the Soul; rules and models are much better than personal whims; they are a discipline good to be followed as long as one can.-- You will note how Aeschylus stood above the possibilities of actualism with which we so much concern ourselves; in the course of some sixteen hundred lines, and without interval or change of act or scene, he introduces the watchman on the house-top who first sees the beacons that announce the fall of Troy, on the very night that Troy fell,--and the return of Agamemnon in his chariot to Argos.

In the _Choephori_ or _Libation-Pourers,_ the second play of the trilogy, Orestes returns from his Wittenberg, sent by Apollo to avenge his father. The scene again is in front of the house of Atreus. Having killed Aegistlios within, Orestes comes out to the Chorus; then Clytemnestra enters; he tells her what he has done, and what he intends to do; and despite her pleadings, leads her in to die beside her paramour. He comes out again, bearing (for his justification) the blood-stained robe of Agamemnon;--but he comes out distraught and with the guilt of matricide weighing on his soul. The Chorus bids him be of good cheer, reminding him upon what high suggestion he has acted; but in the background he, and he alone, sees the Furies swarming to haunt him, "like Gorgons, dark-robed, and all their tresses hang entwined with many serpents; and from their eyes is dropping loathsome blood." He must wander the world seeking purification. In the _Eumenides_ we find him in the temple of Loxias (the Apollo) at Delphi, there seeking refuge with the god who had prompted him to the deed. But even there the Furies haunt him-- though for weariness--or really because it is the shrine of Loxias--they have fallen asleep. From them even Loxias may not free him; only perhaps Pallas at Athens may do that; Loxias announces this to him and bids him go to Athens, and assures him meanwhile of his protection.

To Athens then the scene changes, where Orestes' case is tried: Apollo defends him; Pallas is the judge; the Furies the accusers; the Court of the Areopagus the jury. The votes of these are equally divided; but Athene gives her casting vote in his favor; and to compensate the Erinyes, turns them into Eumenides--from Furies to goddesses of good omen and fortune. Orestes is free, and the end is happy.

No doubt very pretty and feeble of the bronze-throated Eagle- barker to make it so. What! clap on an exit to these piled-up miseries?--he should have plunged us deeper in woe, and left us to stew in our juices; he Should have shunned this detestable effeminacy, worthy only of the Dantes and Shakespeares. But unfortunately he was an Esotericist, with the business of helping, not plaguing, mankind: he must follow the grand symbolism of the story of the Soul, recording and emphasizing and showing the way to its victories, not its defeats. He had the eye to see deep into realities, and was not to be led from the path of truth eternal by the cheap effective expedients of realism. He must tell the whole truth: building up, not merely destroying; and truth, at the end, is not bitter, but bright and glorious. It is the triumph and purification of the soul; and to that happy consummation all sorrow and darkness and the dread Furies themselves, whom he paints with all the dark flame-pigments of sheerest terror, are but incidental and a means.

And the meaning of it all? Well, the meaning is as vast as the scheme of evolution itself, I suppose. It is _Hamlet_ over again, and treated differently; that which wrote _Hamlet_ through Shakespeare, wrote this Trilogy through Aeschylus. I imagine you are to find in the _Agamemnon_ the symbol of the Spirit's fall into matter--of the incarnation (and obscuration) of the Lords of Mind--driven thereto by ancient Karma, and the result--of the life of past universes. Shakespeare deals with this retrospectively, in the Ghost's words to Hamlet on the terrace. The 'death' of the Spirit is its fall into matter.