XIV.

OF MATERNAL LOVE.-ANDROMACHE IN HOMER, IN EURIPIDES, AND

RACINE.

WE have considered the different expressions of paternal love, and have seen how this sentiment has by degrees become less pure and elevated, under the pretext of becoming more tender and passionate. We have seen how paternal tenderness in the dramas of the eighteenth century, has taken the tone of sensibility, and commenced to become materialized, until in our days it has degenerated into a kind of instinct in the Triboulet of Victor Hugo, and into a sort of monomania in the Father Goriot of De Balzac.

We propose to make similar reflections upon maternal love. We wish to show this sentiment, represented first with all the purity, and all the energy which belong to it, then by degrees becoming exaggerated in such a manner as to be no more than a blind and violent affection, which seems to have lost that delicacy of emotion, which is peculiar to maternal tenderness.

We will take for the first subject of the remarks which we propose to make, the character of Andromache; because the character of Andromache, painted by the three great masters of the art, Homer, Euripides, and Racine, enables us to see how maternal love changes its expression, according to times, without changing its basis.

One of the charms of the antique literature, is what we may with propriety denominate, the stability of their characters. Their characters are consecrated by tradition, and it is not lawful to alter them. Phædra, Clytemnestra, Hecuba, Medea, Penelope, Andromache, are the invariable models which their poets reproduce with fidelity; the most they can do is to make one of the features of these traditional

countenances stand out in bolder relief than another. This is all the difference. We might almost say, if we did not fear to make too profane an approximation, that they are in this respect heroic personages of the antique poetry, like the divine and sacred personages in modern painting. The countenances of the Saviour, of the Virgin, of St. John the Baptist, and the chief Apostles, are countenances consecrated by tradition, and which the painters are careful about altering. Each one only gives them an expression, and a particular countenance: it is in this that consists the originality of the painter. For our part, we are persuaded that the respect for the consecrated models, far from restraining the antique poets and painters of modern times, has aided their genius; for their imagination, restrained by this fundamental law of the art, is applied entirely to the expression of the characters and countenances. They aimed at the beautiful rather than the

new.

In Homer, Andromache is the model of conjugal and maternal love; she is the wife and mother, such as antiquity conceived it; modest, reserved, faithful to the domestic roof and to the labors of her sex, loving her husband with an admirable mixture of ardor and respect, and her son with a profound and sweet tenderness, mingled, in Adromache, with sad and gloomy presentiments, which were unfortu nately too soon fulfilled. See this beautiful scene of the parting, when Hector is about to go to combat the Greeks. It is not yet his last and fatal combat with Achilles; but what grief already, and what tenderness, in the adieus of Andromache!

On

"Hector was about to leave the gates of Scea, when Andromache advanced to meet him; behind her walked a slave, who carried in her arms his son Astyanax. seeing his son, Hector calmly smiled, but said nothing. Andromache then took his hand, and said weeping: 'Hector, your rashness will be your destruction, and you do not take pity upon your son, who is in the cradle, and upon me, who will soon become your disconsolate widow; for the Greeks will kill you by all uniting against you.Alas! when I will have lost you, it will be better that I should die myself. I have no other joy and consolation but you, and if you at last meet your fate, I will have nothing but sorrow to expect, after you are gone. I have, as you •

know, neither father nor mother. Achilles has killed my father, and ruined my country; I had seven brothers, who were the pride of my father's house, all of whom perished on the same day, and always under the strokes of Achilles; my mother, also, has in her turn fallen by the arrows of Diana. Hector, you are my father, my mother, my brothers; you are my husband, and the companion of my bed. I beg you, take pity upon me; do not make your son an orphan, and your wife a widow! Assemble the army near this wild figtree; for it is at that point that the city is accessible, and the wall can be scaled; it is there you must remain to defend Troy; for three times already have the most valiant of the Greeks made an effort on this side, the two Ajax, the brave Idomeneus, the two sons of Atreus, and the valiant sons of Tydides, either because a deity had directed them to this spot, or that their courage and their skill impelled them there.' Hector replied: Yes, I will take care to defend the city on this side; but do not try to retain me. would the Trojans, and even the long-robed matrons of Troy, say, if they were to see me basely withdraw from the combat? My heart has not the desire of flight, for I have always braved the perils, and combatted among the first of the Trojans, to defend the glory of my father, and my own. My soul well knows that there will come a day, when will perish the sacred city of Troy and Priam, and the people of Priam. But believe me, I pity the fate of the Trojans, of Hecuba, of Priam, and of my brothers, so numerous and so brave—all of whom will be levelled with the dust, under the

What

strokes of the enemy. It is upon you, especially, Andromache, that I take pity, when I think that some warrior of Argos will seize you weeping and trembling, and lead you captive into his country, and that you will be compelled to weave cloth under the orders of a mistress, or go to bring water from the public fountains, suffering and indignant, but forced to yield to the hard necessity; and then seeing you pass all in tears, they will say, 'There is the wife of Hector, who knew so well how to fight among the Trojans, when the Greeks besieged Troy.' It is thus they will say as you pass by, and it will be to you a new chagrin, when you think of the husband you will have lost, and who could have kept far from you the day of servitude. Ah! may I be dead, and the earth heaped over me, before I hear your groans and see your servitude."

Then comes this touching scene, where Hector wishes to take his son in his arms, and the child, frightened by the helmet of his father, throws himself upon the bosom of his nurse. Hector puts his helmet on the ground, takes the child, and prays Jupiter that he will permit Astyanax to reign over Troy, and surpass the glory of his father; a touching consolation addressed to Andromache, and which alleviates the disquietudes of the wife, by raising the hopes of the mother. Then he places Astyanax in the arms of Andromache, who receives him, smiling and weeping at the same time. These tears and this smile touch Hector; he regards Andromache with a look full of pity and love, and taking her by the hand, he addresses to her these beautiful and solemn words, which are full of the genius of the East and of antiquity; we mean this religious respect for destiny, which almost resembles Christian resignation : "Andromache, do not accuse me in your heart, and do not complain before there is occasion for

it. No warrior, you know, can descend to the tomb, before the day which has been fixed by fate; and no one, be he brave or cowardly, from the time that he is born, can avoid his destiny. Return then to your house; apportion to your slaves their daily labor at the spindle and the distaff; overlook their work; and all of us warriors who were born in Troy, and I especially, will attend to the affairs of war."

Thus we see that resignation and domestic cares are the last consolations, which Hector addresses to Andromache, and which may shock the sensibility of our age, but which are, alas! the only effective consolations to calm the disquietude of the soul. Since Homer, man has not invented others.

In this scene of their parting farewell, maternal love is displayed in a touching manner, although conjugal love retains the mastery as it ought to do. But when her husband is dead, when his corpse, redeemed by Priam, returns to Troy, we hear the lamentations of Andromache, and see how the sorrow which she feels for her son, renders still more terrific the loss of her Hector; how, in a word, maternal love is naturally mingled with her sorrows of widowhood, and keeps them in subjection. Her son an orphan, her son without a protector, her son exposed to the anger of the enraged Greeks, are the ideas and sentiments which continually return to her mind in the midst of her tears: "O my Hector,

how young you were to die! and you have left me a widow in this palace, and your son an orphan, and who will not reach the age of manhood; for before that time this city will be overturned, while you have perished, you who defended it, you who saved its women and children inclosed within its walls. Now these women will be led captive into the vessels of the Greeks, and myself with them. And you, my son, will follow me, condemned to work like a slave under the authority of an imperious master! Perhaps, alas! a Greek will tear you from my arms to precipitate you from the top of the tower; a Greek enraged against our Hector, who had killed his brother, his father, or his son: there have been so many Greeks who have bitten the dust under the blows of Hector! For your father was formidable in battle. Thus, nowadays, the people weep with anguish over his remains. O, Hector! What sorrows you have laid upon your old father, mother, and above all, upon me! What a long misfortune! And even in dying you did not offer me your hand and address a last and good word for me to remember, night and day, in the midst of my tears!"

We wish carefully to consider the character of Andromache in Homer, because all the other poets have taken her from the hands of Homer, just as he had created her. But in these poets, the person of Andromache has become the type of maternal love only for after Hector, who can Andromache love so much as her son Astyanax? What is there better than maternal love, which can take the place of conjugal love in the heart of this modest and reserved woman? And that is so true, that Euripides, the boldest innovator among the Greek poets, taking Andromache for the subject of one of his tragedies, and giving her another husband than Hector, and another son than Astyanax, has nevertheless represented her rescuing her son Molossus from death. So much was the person of Andromache among the ancients destined to express maternal love and its anguish! The poets could change the events, but could not alter the sentiments.

Andromache figures in the two tragedies of Euripides, The Trojans and Andromache; in the one bewailing the loss of her son Astyanax, whom they tear from her arms to precipitate from the top of the ramparts of Troy; in the other, trembling for the life of Molossus, the son whom she had from Neoptolemus, and pursued by the hatred of Hermione. Let