Part 9

And just as the ghost urges Hamlet to revenge, so Apollo urges Orestes; it is the influx, stir, or impingement of the Supreme Self, that rouses a man, at a certain stage in his evolution, to lift himself above his common manhood. This is the most interesting and momentous event in the long career of the soul: it takes the place, in that drama of incarnations, that the marriage does in the modern novel. Shakespeare, whose mental tendencies were the precise opposite of Aeschylus's--they ran to infinite multiplicity and complexity, where the other's ran to stern unity and simplicity (of plot)--made two characters of Polonius and Gertrude: Polonius,--the objective lower world, with its shallow wisdom and conventions; Gertrude,--Nature, the lower world in it subjective or inner relation to the soul incarnate in it. Aeschylus made no separate symbol for the former. Shakespeare makes the killing of Polonius a turning-point; thenceforth Hamlet must, will he nill he, in some dawdling sort sweep to his revenge. Aeschylus makes that same turning-point in the killing of Clytemnestra, whereafter the Furies are let loose on Orestes. If you think well what it means, it is that "leap" spoken of in _Light on the Path,_ by which a man raises himself "on to the path of individual accomplishment instead of mere obedience to the genii which rule our earth." He can no longer walk secure like a sheep in the flock; he has come out, and is separate; he has chosen a captain within, and must follow the Soul, and not outer convention. That step taken, and the face set towards the Spirit-Sun--the life of the world forgone, that a way may be fought into the Life of the Soul:--all his past lives and their errors rise against him; his passions are roused to fight for their lives, and easy living is no longer possible. He must fly then for refuge to Loxias the Sun-God, the Supreme Self, who can protect him from these Erinyes--but it is Pallas, Goddess of the Inner Wisdom, of the true method of life, that can alone set him free. And it is thus that Apollo pleads before her for Orestes who killed his mother (Nature) to avenge his Father (Spirit):--a man, says he, is in reality the child of his father, not of his mother:--this lower world in which we are incarnate is not in truth our parent or originator at all, but only the seed-plot in which we, sons of the Eternal, are sown, the nursery in which we grow to the point of birth;--but we ourselves are in our essence flame of the Flame of God. So Pallas--and you must think of all she implied--Theosophy, right living, right thought and action, true wisdom--judges Orestes guiltless, sets him free, and transforms his passions into his powers.

V. SOME PERICLEAN FIGURES

Yoshio Markino (that ever-delightful Japanese) makes an illuminating comparison between the modern western and the ancient eastern civilizations. What he says amounts to this: the one is of Science, the other of the Human Spirit; the one of intellect, the other of intuition; the one has learnt rules for carrying all things through in some shape that will serve--the other worked its wonders by what may be called a Transcendental Rule of Thumb. But in fact it was a reliance on the Human Spirit, which invited the presence thereof;--and hence results were attained quite unachievable by modern scientific methods. What Yoshio says of the Chinese and Japanese is also true of all the great western ages of the past. We can do a number of things,-- that is, have invented machinery to do a number of things for us,--but with all our resources we could not build a Parthenon: could not even reproduce it, with the model there before our eyes to imitate.*

* I quote Prof. Mahaffy in his _Problems of Greek History._ He also points out that it is beyond the powers of modern science in naval architecture to construct a workable model of a Greek trireme. ------

It stands as a monument of the Human Spirit: as an age-long witness to the presence and keen activity of that during the Age of Pericles in Athens. It was built at almost break-neck speed, yet remains a thing of permanent inimitable beauty, defying time and the deliberate efforts of men and gunpowder to destroy it. The work in it which no eye could see was as delicate, as exquisite, as that which was most in evidence publicly; every detail bore the deliberate impress of the Spirit, a direct spiritual creation. There is no straight line in it; no two measurements are the same; but by a divine and direct intuition, every difference is inevitable, and an essential factor in the perfection of the whole. As if the same creative force had made it, as makes of the sea and mountains an inescapable perfection of beauty.

It is one of the many mighty works wherewith Pericles and his right-hand man Pheidias, and his architects Ictinus and Callicrates, adorned Athens. It would serve no purpose to make a list of the great names of the age; which you know well enough already. The simple fact to note is this: that at a certain period in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. the Crest-Wave of Evolution was, so far as we can see, flowing through a very narrow channel. The Far Eastern seats of civilization were under pralaya; the life-forces in West Asia were running towards exhaustion, or already exhausted; India, it is true, is hidden from us; we cannot judge well what was going on there; and so was most of Europe. Any scheme of cycles that we can put forward as yet must necessarily be tentative and hypothetical; what we do not know is, to what we do know, as a million to one; I may be quite wrong in giving Europe as long a period for its manvantaras as China; possibly there were no manvantaric activities in Europe, in that period, before the rise of Greece. But whether or no, this particular time belongs, of all European countries, to Greece: the genius of the world, the energy of the human spirit, was mainly concentrated there; and of Greece, in the single not too large city of Athens. It is true I am rather enamored of the cycle of a hundred and thirty years; prejudiced, if you like, in its favor; it is also true that genius was speaking through at least one world-important Athenian voice-- that of Aeschylus--before the age of Pericles began. Still, these dates are significant: 477, in which year Athens attained the hegemony of Greece, and 347, in which Plato died. It was after 477 that Aeschylus eagle-barked the grandest part of his message from the Soul, and that the great Periclean figures appeared; and though Athenians of genius out-lived Plato, he was the last world-figure and great Soul-Prophet; the last Athenian equal in standing to Aeschylus. When those thirteen decades had passed, the Soul had little more to say through Athens.-- Aristotle?--I said, _the Soul_ had little more to say. . . .

About midway through that cycle came Aegospotami, and the destruction of the Long Walls and of the Empire; but these did not put an end to Athenian significance. Mahaffy very wisely goes to work to dethrone the Peloponnesian War--as he does, too, the Persian--from the eminence it has been given in the textbooks ever since. As usual, we get a lopsided view from the historians: in this case from Thucydides, who slurred through a sort of synopsis of the far more important and world-interesting mid-fifth century, and then dealt microscopically with these twenty-five years or so of trumpery raidings, petty excursions and small alarms. That naval battle at Syracuse, which Creasy puts with Marathon in his famous fifteen, was utterly unimportant: tardy Nicias might have won all through, and still Athens would have fallen. Her political foundations were on the sand. Under Persia you stood a much better chance of enjoying good government and freedom: Persian rule was far less oppressive and cruel. The states and islands subject to Athens had no self-government, no representation; they were at the mercy of the Athenian mob, to be taxed, bullied, and pommeled about as that fickle irresponsible tyranny might elect or be swayed to pommel, tax, and bully them. Thucydides was a great master of prose style, and so could invest with an air of importance all the matter of his tale. Besides, he was the only contemporary historian, or the only one that survives. So the world ever since has been tricked into thinking this Peloponnesian War momentous; whereas really it was a petty family squabble among that most family-squabblesome of peoples, the Greeks.--In most of which I am only quoting Mahaffy; who, whether intentionally or not, deals with Greek history in such a way as to show the utter unimportance, irrelevance, futility, of war.

Greek history is merely a phase of human history. We have looked for its significance exclusively in political and cultural regions; but this is altogether a mistake. The Greeks did not invent culture; there had been greater cultures before, only they are forgotten. All that about the "evolution of Political freedom," of the city state, republicanism, etc., is just nonsense. As far as I can see, the importance of Greece lies in this: human history, the main part of it, flowing in that age through the narrow channel of Greece, came down from sacred to secular; from the last remnants of a state of affairs in which the Lodge, through the Mysteries, had controlled life and events, to the beginnings of one in which things were to muddle through under the sweet guidance of brain-minds and ordinary men. The old order had become impossible; the world had drifted too far from the Gods. So the Gods tried a new method: let loose a new great force in the world; sent Teachers to preach openly (sow broadcast, and let the seed take its chances) what had before been concealed and revealed systematically within the Established Mysteries. What Athens did with that new force has affected the whole history of Europe since; apparently mostly for weal; really, nearly altogether for woe.

Aristides, with convincing logic, had been able to persuade all Greece to act against a common danger under an Athens then morally great, and feeling this new force from the God-world as a wine in the air, a mental ozone, an inspiration from the subliminal to heroic endeavor. But his policy perished when the visible need for it subsided; it gave way to the Themistoclean, which passed into the Periclean policy; and that, says Mahaffy, "was so dangerous and difficult that no cautious and provident thinker could have called it secure." Which also was Plato's view of it; who went so far as to say that Pericles had made the Athenians lazy, sensual, and frivolous. When we find Aeschylus at the start at odds with it, and Plato at the end condemning it wholesale,--for my part I think we hardly need bother to argue about it further. Both were men who saw from a standpoint above the enlightenment of the common brain-mind.

It is not the present purpose to treat history as a matter of wars and politics; details of which you can get from any textbook; our concern is with the motions of the human spirit, and the laws that work from behind. As to these motions, and the grand influxes, there is this much we can rely on: they come by law, in their regular cycles; and we can invite their coming, and insure their stability when they do come. The more I study history, the more the significance of my present surroundings impresses me. We stand here upon a marvelous isthmus in time; behind us lies a world of dreary commonplaces called the civilization of Christendom; before us--who knows what possibilities? Nothing is certain about the future--even the near future;--except that it will be immensely unlike the past. Whatever we have learned or failed to learn, large opportunities are given us daily for discovering those inward regions whence all light shines down into the world. Genius is one method of the Soul's action; one aspect of its glory made manifest. We are given opportunities to learn what invites and what hinders its outflow. To all common thinking, it is a thing absolutely beyond control of the will; that cannot be called down, nor its coming in anywise foretold. But we know that the Divine Self would act, were the obstructions to its action removed; and that the obstructions are all in the lower nature of man.

Worship the Soul in all thoughts and deeds, and sooner or later the Soul will pour down through the channel thus made for it; and its inflow will not be fitful and treacherous, but sure, stable, equable and redeeming.

This is where all past ages of brilliance have failed. Cyclically they were bound to come: the fields ripened in due season; but the wealth of the harvest depended on the reapers. The Elizabethan Age, with all its splendid quickening of the English mind, was coarse and wicked to a degree. All through the wonderful Cinquecento, when each of a dozen or more little Italian city-states was producing genius enough to furnish forth a good average century in modern Europe or America, Italy was also a hotbed of unnatural vices, lurid crimes, wickedness to stock the nine circles of Malebolge. So too Athens at the top of her glory became selfish, grasping, conscienceless and cruel; and those nameless vices grew up and grew common in her which probably account for the long dark night that has spread itself over Greece ever since. It is a strange situation, that looks like an anomaly: that wherever the Human Spirit presses in most, and raises up most splendor of genius, there, and then the dark forces that undermine life are most at work. But we should have no difficulty in understanding it. At such times, by such influxes, the whole inner kingdom of man is roused and illumined; and not only the intellect and all noble qualities are quickened, but the passions also. The race, and the individual, are stirred to the deepest depths, and no part of you may have rest. What then will happen, unless you have the surest moral training for foundation? The force which rouses up the highest in you, rouses up also the lowest; and there must be battle-royal and victory at last, or surrender to hell. Through lack of training, and ignorance of the laws of the inner life, the Higher will be handicapped; the lower will have advantage through its own natural impulse downward, increased by every success it is allowed to gain. And so all these ages of creative achievement exhaust themselves; every victory of the passions drawing down the creative force from the higher planes, to waste it on the lower; till at last what had been an attempt of the Spirit to lift humanity up on to nobler lines of evolution, and to open a new order of ages, expires in debauchery, weakness, degeneracy, physical and moral death. The worst fate you could wish a man is genius without moral strength. It wrecks individuals, and it wrecks nations. I said we stand now on an isthmus of time; fifth-century Greece stood on such another. For reasons that we have seen, there was to be a radical difference between the ages that preceded, and the ages that followed it; its influence was not to wear out, in the west, for twenty-five hundred years. It was to give a keynote, in cultural effort, to a very long future. So all western ages since have suffered because of its descent from lofty ideals to vulgar greed and ambition; from Aristides to Themistocles and Pericles. We shall see this Athenian descent in literature, in art, in philosophy. If Athens had gone up, not down, European history would have been a long record of the triumphs of the spirit:--not, as it has been in the main, one of sorrow and disaster.

At the beginning of the Greek age in literature, we find the stupendous figure of Aeschylus. For any such a force as he was, there is--how shall I say?--a twofold lineage or ancestry to be traced: there are no sudden creations. Take Shakespeare, for example. There was what he found read to his hand in English literature; and what he brought into England out of the Unknown. In his outwardness, the fabric of his art--we can trace this broad river back to a thinnish stream by the name of Chaucer; or he was growth, recognizably, of the national tree of which Chaucer was the root, or lay at the root. The unity called English poetry had grown naturally from that root to this glorious flower: the sparkle, with, brightness, and above all large hold upon the other life that one finds in Shakespeare--one finds at least the rudiments of them in Chaucer also. But there is another, an exoteric element in him which one finds nowhere in English literature before him: the Grandeur from within, the high Soul Symbol. In him suddenly that portentous thing appears, like a great broad river emerging from the earth.--Of which we do not say, however, that they have had no antecedent rills and fountain; we know that they have traveled long beneath the mountains, unseen; they sank under the earth-surface somewhere, and are not special new creations. Looking back behind Shakespeare, from this our eminence in time, we can see beyond the intervening heights this broad water shine again over the plain in Dante; and beyond him some glimmer of it in Virgil; until at last we see the far-off sheen of it in Aeschylus, very near the backward horizon of time. We can catch no glimpse of it farther, because that horizon is there.

We can trace Aeschylus' outward descent--as Shakespeare's from Chaucer--from the nascent Greek drama and the rudimentary plays at the rustic festivals; but the grand river of his esotericism --there it shines, as large and majestic, at least, as in Shakespeare; and it was, no more than his, a special creation or new thing. Our horizon lies there, to prevent our vision going further; but from some higher time-eminence in the future, we shall see it emerge again in the backward vastnesses of pre-history; again and again. The grandeur of Aeschylus his no parent in Greek, or in western extant literature; or if we say that it has a parent in Homer (which I doubt, because not seeing the Soul Symbols in Homer), it is only putting matters one step further back.... But behind Greece, there were the lost literatures of Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, of which we know nothing; aye, and for a guess, lost and mighty literatures from all parts of Europe too. If I could imagine it otherwise, I would say so.

Almost suddenly, during Aeschylus' lifetime, another Greek Art came into being. When he was a boy, sculpture was still a very crude affair; or perhaps just beginning to emerge from that condition. The images that come down to us, say from Pisistratus' time and earlier, are not greatly different from the 'primitive' carvings of many so-called savage peoples of our own day. That statement is loose and general; but near enough the mark to serve our purpose. You may characterize them as rude imitations of the human form, without any troublesome realism, and with a strong element of the grotesque. Says the _Encyclopeadia Britannica_ (from which the illustration is taken):

"The statues of the gods began either with stiff and ungainly figures roughly cut out of the trunk of a tree, or with the monstrous and symbolical representations of Oriental art.... In early decorations of vases and vessels one may find Greek deities represented with wings, carrying in their hands lions or griffins, bearing on their heads lofty crowns. But as Greek art progressed it grew out of this crude symbolism... What the artists of Babylonia and Egypt express in the character of the gods by added attribute or symbol, swiftness by wings, control of storms by the thunderbolt, traits of character by animal heads, the artists of Greece work more and more fully into the scultptural type; modifying the human subject by the constant addition of something which is above the ordinary levels of humanity, until we reach the Zeus of Pheidias or the Dimeter of Cnidus. When the decay of the high ethical art of Greece sets in, the Gods become more and more warped to the merely human level. They lose their dignity, but they never lose their charm."

In which, I think, much light is once more thrown on the inner history of the race, and the curious and fatal position Greece holds in it. For here we see Art emerging from its old Position as a hand-maid to the Mysteries and recognized instrument of the Gods or the Soul; from sacred becoming secular; from impersonal, personal. There is, perhaps, little enough in pre-Pheidian Greek sculpture that belongs to the history of Art at all (I do not speak of old cycles and manvantaras, the ages of Troy and Mycenae, but of historical times; I cast no glance now behind the year 870 B. C.). For the real art that came next before the Pheidian Greek, we have to look to Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Take Egypt first. There the sculptor thinks of himself far less as artist than as priest and servant of the Mysteries: that is, of the great Divine heart of Existence behind this manifested world, and the official channel which connected It with the latter. The Gods, for him, are frankly unhuman--superhuman-- unlike humanity. We call them 'forces of Nature'; and think ourselves mighty wise for having camouflaged our ignorance with this perfectly meaningless term. We have dealt so wisely with our thinking organs, that do but give us a sop of words, and things in themselves we shall never bother about:--like the Grave-digger, who solved the whole problem of Ophelia's death and burial with his three branches of an act. But the Egyptian, with mental faculties unrotted by creedal fatuities like our own, would not so feed 'of the chameleon's dish,'--needed something more than words, words, and words. He knew also that there were elements in their being quite unlike any we are conscious of in ours. So he gave them purely symbolic forms: a human body, for that which he could posit as common to themselves and humanity; and an animal mask, to say that the face, the expression of their consciousness, was hidden, and not to be expressed in terms of human personality. While affirming that they were conscious entities, he stopped short of personalizing them. What was beneath the mask or symbol belonged to the Mysteries, and was not to be publicly declared.