alone represented? Why are the most noble and elevated emotions of the dying man suppressed; those which are addressed to the real pity of men, the pity which is mingled with admiration and respect, and not that which borders on disgust? We love to hear Iphigenia regret the light so pleasant to see; we love her fear of the subterranean shades; we are touched with her regrets for life; but in her plaints there is something besides the physical and material fear of death; and when she resigns herself, what nobleness! what dignity! How profoundly affecting is this last look and kiss which she wishes to snatch from her father! How that resignation touches our hearts without being a source of uneasiness and pain! There is certainly truth in the shrieks of Catarina, but it is a truth which, if we may so speak, comes in the order of the truths of natural history. In the plaints of Iphigenia, there is a truth more human and more noble. We will introduce a historical reminiscence, illustrative of the two kinds of dramatic emotion which we have endeavored to portray. During the French Revolution, in 1794, a woman was conducted from prison to the guillotine. Placed in the same fatal cart with her companions in misfortune, Madame Roland had a brow as smooth and a countenance as calm as when she was in her drawing-room in the midst of the Girondists. Haughty, and braving with disdain the insults of the sanguinary mob, she exclaimed in ascending the scaffold, "O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" Always dignified and majestic, she died in this manner without complaining, without agitation, without uttering any cries or convulsions of agony. Were the populace affected? No. They did not comprehend the tranquil beauty of this death. 66 A few days afterwards, another woman was taken from prison to the scaffold; this was Madame DuBarry. This unfortunate woman, who had learned courage and dignity only at the supper parties of Louis XV., uttered frightful screams, being unable to resign herself to the idea of dying; and upon the scaffold she cried out, " Mr. Executioner, will you spare me a little moment?" This little miserable moment was not granted her, and her head fell upon the ground with her mouth wide open. The populace were affected at this. This convulsion and palpitating agony, this struggle for life, struck them and moved them to pity. They understood this kind of tragedy. III. OF MAN'S STRUGGLES WITH PHYSICAL PAIN-THE PHILOCTETES OF SOPHOCLES-A SCENE IN THE ROMANCE OF NOTRE DAME DE PARIS, BY VICTOR HUGO. SINCE the introduction of Christianity, literature and the drama have become essentially spiritual. In the age in which we live, literature, without ceasing to take moral suf. fering for its subject, has pushed this suffering even to physical pain. It has materialized moral grief, while the Greeks who represented physical pain, idealized it by the aid of the beautiful. They elevated themselves from the body to the mind we follow the opposite direction. They advanced by degrees towards Christian spiritualism; while we seem to have retrograded towards Pagan materialism. We will endeavor to explain these observations by a few examples. We love beauty, we do not adore it. The Greeks loved and idolized it. They had no gods but those which were ⚫ beautiful. Pluto himself was beautiful, although he was the god of Hades. When the Greeks represented man, they had the same regard to his beauty: their painters and statuaries only represented men who were handsome. "Who wants to paint you," said an old epigram, "when nobody wants to see you?" They had a horror of taking portraits; that is, the likeness of every one who desired it. So far did they carry this aversion, that even the conquerors at the Olympic games, who had a right to a statue, did not obtain an iconic one, that is, a perfect likeness, until they had obtained three victories! With this aversion for the ugly, they never represented the excess of passion: Extreme pain and extreme anger produce contortion, and contortion disfigures. Timanthes, in his picture of the Sacrifice of Iphigenia, veiled the head of Agamemnon; not that he despaired, as they say, of being able to render a faithful expression of such grief, but because he could do so only by giving to the countenance of the hero an agitation which would have disfigured it. Sculpture has represented the children of Niobe, some already dead and others expiring; the former pierced by fatal darts in their flight, the latter in the act of supplication; Niobe herself protecting with her own body her last and youngest daughter, for whom she in vain implores the mercy of the gods, whom the arrow of Diana has stricken between her arms. But none of them have a disordered attitude or a violent gesture; their countenances, and we might almost say that their bodies* express supplication, suffering, terror, and even death, with remarkable truthfulness, and at the same time with an admirable dignity and consistency. Niobe herself, this mother who sees her children perish, is beautiful and majestic, because the statuary has seized the moment when, having still a daughter whom she entreats the gods to leave her, she has not yet reached the excess of grief; he has avoided the moment when Niobe, seated among the dead bodies of her fourteen children who have perished before her eyes, would have abandoned herself to despair. In fact, while there is still some hope in grief, the soul, and consequently the human countenance, preserve a kind of equilibrium and proportion; and it is this which constitutes the moral and material beauty which the Greek art wished to express. And let us not believe that the antique poetry was more disposed than sculpture or painting to represent the passions. in their moments of excess; she had the same scruples. Thus when Niobe had reached the last degree of anguish, poetry, instead of doing violence to art in representing the disorder of this distracted mother, changes her into a rock; she preferred to metamorphose man rather than to disfigure him. The antique imagination (for poetry was only the interpreter of the popular imagination) believed that when the passion was excessive, the man disappeared; a just and profound * In Greek statuary, the expression, instead of being concentrated in the face, as in modern statuary, is spread over the whole body; and nudity is for Greek sculpture not a habit borrowed from the climate, (since the Greeks were clad), but a resource of art in order the better to express the ideas and sentiments of their subjects. idea which lies at the basis of what we now call the philosophy of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Hecuba, when she happens to meet the body of Polypus on the sea-shore, the lastborn and the last-dead of her fifty children, the only one whom she believed she had saved from the ruins of Troy, she is no longer a woman and a queen. Do you hear those melancholy and furious howlings? Poetry has at once ex. pressed and concealed in this metamorphosis the despair of Hecuba.* As soon as a passion exceeded the strength or capacity of the human heart, ancient poetry had recourse to prodigy; it preferred a miracle to exaggeration. She changed Biblis into a fountain, because she despaired of ever being able to express the anguish of incestuous and abominable love; she changed Halcyon into a bird, because she did not believe that words could adequately express the despair of the widow of Ceyx. In fine, whoever was carried by passion beyond the limits of humanity, lost in the ancient fable the countenance and features of a man. The antique art, whether it be that with admirable propriety it selects the moment which precedes the excess of passion, or going beyond this moment and not stopping there, it reaches the marvellous, which envelopes all under its shadow; the antique art had a greater influence on the imagination than modern art, which is compelled to express the extravagance of the passions. The pretension of modern art is to say every thing. What would then remain for the imagination of the public to exercise itself upon? It is often best to leave it to the spectator to complete the idea of the poet or the sculptor. Sophocles in Philoctetes did not fear to represent physical pain; but it would be a great error to believe that he has chosen this subject from his taste for the ugly, which has been for some time past one of the manias of modern literature. He has found in the tradition, Philoctetes wounded by a serpent, abandoned by the Greeks in the Isle of Lemnos, and making the rocks re-echo with the cries which his pain extort Priameia conjux Perdidit infelix hominis, post omnia, formam; -Veterum que diu memor illa malorum, Tum quoque Sithonios ululavit mæsta per agros. [OVID. Met., b xiii. ed from him; and he respected the tradition. Cicero censures Sophocles not for having permitted his hero to utter some feeble complaints, but for having terrified the whole island with his groans.* Suppressed groans do not produce much effect on the stage. What we admire, on the contrary, in the drama, is the art of the poet who has left to the hero his wound, his cries, and the mournful accompaniments of physical suffering, but who has also given to his hero the moral passions which counterbalance the emotions which the sight of his sufferings creates. This wounded man does not only think of his wounds; he hates Ulysses and the Atrides who have abandoned him on this desert isle; and were he even to obtain his cure under the walls of Troy, he would not carry the victorious arrows of Hercules to the Atrides. His hatred does not only give evidence of the energy which his soul has preserved in spite of his sufferings: he regrets his father, his country, and the pleasant banks of the Sperchius; he bewails the death of Achilles and Ajax, and Neop. tolemus is astonished that Philoctetes, in pain and exile, should still have tears for the misfortunes of another. At last, when he leaves his isle and his cavern, so long the witnesses of his grief, he does not leave them with hatred and impatience as the sick man leaves his bed; he bids adieu to the rocks which afforded him shelter, to the fountains which quenched his thirst, and to the sea whose waves came to grieve as if in sympathy at the base of his rock. Thus we see that so far from the soul of this sick man being insensible, so far from physical suffering detracting from his moral emotion, Philoctetes feels acutely, anger, hatred, regret, affection, all the sentiments in short which fill the human heart. Physical pain does not constitute the dramatic interest of Philoctetes; on the contrary, the ascendant which his moral nature has over his material is the distinguishing trait in his character. This ascendant, it is true, is not employed in subduing passion as a philosopher would do; but what proves best that Philoctetes has preserved his moral energy, are these words: "Come," said Neoptolemus, come to those who will cure you." "Never," replied Philoctetes, never will I go to those who have abandoned me." Propose to a sick man, and 66 66 * Quamobrem turpe putandum est, non dico dolore, (nam quid interdum est necesse), sed saxum illud lemnium clamore Philoctetæ funestare.-CICERO. De finibus, b. ii. |