FOURTH LECTURE.

Progress of Tragic Art among the Greeks. Its different Styles. Eschylus. Connexion of one of his Trilogies. His other Works. Life and poetical character of Sophocles. Critique upon his tragedies, severally.

Or the boundless stores the Greeks possessed in the tragic department, and which were elicited by the public contests at the Athenian Festivals, for the rival poets always contended for a prize, only a very small proportion has come down to our times. Of their many tragedians, we possess works of only three, Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and of these but a few in comparison with the numerous productions of those authors. The extant dramas are such as the Alexandrine Critics included in their selection of authors, which they designed as a groundwork for the study of the older Grecian Literature; not that they considered their selections to be the only valuable pieces, but because in them the different styles of Tragic Art might be most prominently recognized. Of each of the two older dramatists we have seven pieces, but among these are to be found several of what the ancients testify to be their most distinguished works. Of Euripides we have a much greater number, and many of them we could gladly exchange for other lost works-Satyric Dramas, for instance, of Achæus, Eschylus and Sophocles; or some pieces of old Phrynichus to compare with Eschylus; or of Agathon in more recent times, whom Plato describes as weak but amiable, and who was contemporary with Euripides, but his junior.

The stories about the waggon of the itinerant Thespis, and the contests for the prize of a goat, whence, it is said, the name of Tragedy is derived, and the lees of wine with which the first improvisatory players smeared their faces, and others of the like kind, from which rude beginnings, Eschylus, by one gigantic stride, elevated Tragedy to that dignified form in which she occurs in his works; we leave to the critical sieve of the antiquarian, and so proceed forthwith to the poets themselves.

The tragic style of Eschylus, (using the word style in the sense it bears in Sculpture, and not merely as denoting the manner of writing) is grand, severe, and often hard; the style of Sophocles has a finished symmetry and harmonious gracefulness; that of Euripides is soft and luxuriant; lavish in his easy redundancy, he sacrifices the general effect to brilliant passages. The Fine Arts of the Greeks, which we have the opportunity of surveying in the unbroken sequence of their development, present analogies all along which will allow us to compare the epochs of Tragic Art with those of Sculpture. Eschylus is the Phidias of Tragedy, Sophocles her Polycletus, Euripides her Lysippus. Phidias wrought sublime forms of Gods, but withal, he lent them an extrinsic splendour of material, and environed their majestic repose with images of the most stormy contests in strong relief. Polycletus attained the perfection of proportions, for which reason one of his statues was called the Standard of Beauty. Lysippus distinguished himself by the ardour of his imagery, but in his time Sculpture had already receded from her original calling, and rather studied to catch the charm of the moving, living being, than aspired to reach the ideal in form.

ESCHYLUS is to be regarded as the creator of Tragedy: in full panoply she sprang from his head as did Pallas from the head of Jupiter. He clad her with dignity and gave her a befitting stage; he invented scenic pomp; he not only trained his chorus in the song and dance, but himself took part as an actor. It was he that first expanded the dialogue, and limited the lyric part of Tragedy, which, however, still often occupies too great a space in his plays. The characters he dashes off with a few bold, strong touches. His plots are simple in the extreme; the art of distributing an action into rich and varied members, and of portioning out its complication and disentanglement into measured gradations was reserved for others. Hence the action often comes to a stand-still, of which he makes us still more sensible by excessive protraction of his choral odes. But all his productions evidence a lofty and earnest spirit. No softer emotion, but terror predominates with him; he holds up a Medusa-head before the petrified spectators. His management of Destiny is extremely harsh: she hovers over the heads of mortals in all her gloomy majesty. The cothurnus of Eschylus

treads, one might say, with the ponderousness of iron; forms, sheerly gigantic, stalk in upon it. To depict mere human beings seems almost to cost him an effort of self-denial: gods he continually introduces, especially Titans, those elder Divinities, shadowing forth the gloomy powers of primeval Nature, and thrust down, long ago, into Tartarus, beneath a world at length reduced to more serene order. To match the dimensions of his personages, he would fain exaggerate the very language they speak into a gigantic vastness. Hence his rugged compounds, his overloading epithets, and in the lyric parts the many involved constructions and great consequent obscurity. In the altogether singular strangeness of his imagery and expressions he ranks with Dante and Shakspeare. Yet in these images there is no want of that terrific grace which the ancients so generally extol in Eschylus.

He flourished precisely at the æra when Grecian freedom, after its emancipation, was in its prime of vigour, and with the proud consciousness of this he seems to be thoroughly penetrated. He had lived to behold, as an eye-witness, the greatest and most glorious event of Greece, the overthrow, nay the annihilation of the overbearing power of Persia under Darius and Xerxes, and had himself fought with distinguished bravery at Marathon and Salamis. In his Persians he has indirectly hymned the triumph he helped to achieve, depicting in that performance the ruin of the Persian empire, and the shameful return of the despot, with difficulty escaping to his seat of royalty. The battle of Salamis he paints in most vivid colours. The vein of a warrior runs throughout this play and the Seven against Thebes: indeed the poet's personal inclination to a life of war shines through both, in a manner not to be mistaken. It was a clever saying of the Sophist Gorgias, that in the great drama last-mentioned, Mars inspired the poet instead of Bacchus :-for Bacchus was the tutelary deity of the tragic poets, not Apollo; a circumstance which at first sight seems strange, but then we should bear in mind that Bacchus was not merely the god of wine and gladness, but also of the higher inspiration.

Among the extant works of Eschylus, we have, what is well worthy of remark, a complete Trilogy. The antiquarian account of the trilogies is this: that in the more ancient times

the poets contended for the prize, not with a single piece, but with three, which however were not always connected in their subjects; to these was added a fourth, namely, a Satyric Drama. All were acted in one day, one after another. In relation to the tragic art, the notion of a trilogy is this: that although a tragedy cannot be indefinitely protracted, like the Homeric poem, for instance, to which entire rhapsodies have been appended-tragedy is too independent, too self-compact for this nevertheless, there may be several tragedies formed into a great cycle or period, the connecting bond being one common destiny pervading their several actions. And the restriction to the number three admits of a satisfactory explanation: namely, it is thesis, synthesis, antithesis. The advantage of this connexion is, that from the contemplation of the conjoint histories there results a more complete satisfaction than could possibly be attained in the single action. Further, let it be observed, that the subjects of the three tragedies might either lie far apart in time, or follow each other in unbroken sequence.

The three component parts of the Eschylean Trilogy are Agamemnon, The Choëphora (or as we should call it, Electra,) and The Eumenides or Furies. The subject of the first is Agamemnon's death by the hands of Clytemnestra on his return from Troy. In the second, Orestes avenges his father by putting his mother to death; facto pius et sceleratus eodem. The deed, though urged by the most powerful motives, is revolting to the natural and moral order of things. Orestes, it is true, as a ruler, is called upon to exercise justice even upon his own family, but then he is here under the necessity of creeping in disguise into the abode of the tyrannical usurper of his throne, and of going to work like an assassin. The memory of his father is his acquittal, but however deserving of death Clytemnestra may be, the voice of blood cries against him from within. This is represented under the form of a controversy between the gods; one party of whom approve the act of Orestes, the others persecute him, till Divine Wisdom under the form of Minerva balances the claims on either side, establishes peace, and puts an end to the long train of crime and vengeance which had desolated the royal house of Atreus.

Between the first and second piece a considerable interval elapses, during which Orestes grows up to manhood. The second

and third, on the contrary, immediately cohere in time. Orestes, upon the murder of his mother, forthwith flees to Delphi, where we find him at the opening of the Eumenides.

In each of the two first dramas there is a visible reference to the intended sequel. In "Agamemnon," Casandra, and, at the close of the play, the chorus, predict the future requital which should come by the hands of Orestes upon the haughty Clytæmnestra and her helpmate Ægisthus. In "The Choëphoro," Orestes has no sooner perpetrated the deed, than he falls into a perturbation; his mother's Furies begin to agitate him, and he announces his purpose of fleeing to Delphi.

That the three plays, therefore, mutually cohere, is plain, and as they were actually brought on the stage in sequence, they may be regarded as so many acts of one grand heroic drama. I mention this, in order to vindicate the practice of Shakspeare and other modern dramatists, in comprising into one drama an extensive cycle of human destinies; because the very objection that has been made to the practice is the alleged example of the ancients to the contrary.

In "Agamemnon," the author designed to exhibit a sudden downfall from the very summit of prosperity and renown into an abyss of ruin. The ruler, the hero, the commander of the banded hosts of Greece, at the very instant of his success in that most glorious achievement, the destruction of Troy, for which his fame should be re-echoed in time present and time to come, in the very act of crossing the threshold of the home for which he has so long been sighing, and amidst the fearless security of preparation for a festive banquet, is butchered, as Homer expresses it, "like an ox at his crib," slain by his perfidious wife, his throne usurped by her worthless paramour, his children consigned to banishment or helpless servitude.

With a view of giving a striking effect to so terrific a reverse of fortune, the poet was obliged in the first place to impart fresh splendour to the conquest of Troy. This he has done in the first half of the play, in a peculiar, nay, if you will, a strange, but certainly a most impressive manner, and so as greatly to arrest the imagination. It is of great importance to Clytæmnestra that she should not be taken by surprise by her husband's return. She has therefore taken measures to maintain an unbroken line of beacon-fires from Troy to Mycena, to an