The Greek View of Life Part 15

At the conclusion of the ode enters Clytemnestra. She makes a formal announcement to the chorus of the fall of Troy; describes the course of the signal-fire from beacon to beacon as it sped, and pictures in imagination the scenes even then taking place in the doomed city. On her withdrawal the chorus break once more into song and dance. To the music of a solemn hymn they point the moral of the fall of Troy, the certain doom of violence and fraud descended upon Paris and his House. Once more the vivid pictures flash from the night of woe--Helen in her fatal beauty stepping lightly to her doom, the widower's nights of mourning haunted by the ghost of love, the horrors of the war that followed, the slain abroad and the mourners at home, the change of living flesh and blood for the dust and ashes of the tomb. At last with a return to their original theme, the doom of insolence, the chorus close their ode and announce the arrival of a messenger from Troy. Talthybius, the herald, enters as spokesman of the army and king, describing the hardships they have suffered and the joy of the triumphant issue. To him Clytemnestra announces, in words of which the irony is patent to the audience, her sufferings in the absence of her husband and her delight at the prospect of his return. He will find her, she says, as he left her, a faithful watcher of the home, her loyalty sure, her honour undefiled. Then follows another choral ode, similar in theme to the last, dwelling on the woe brought by the act of Paris upon Troy, the change of the bridal song to the trump of war and the dirge of death; contrasting, in a profusion of splendid tropes, the beauty of Helen with the curse to which it is bound; and insisting once more on the doom that attends insolence and pride. At the conclusion of this song the measure changes to a march, and the chorus turn to welcome the triumphant king.

Agamemnon enters, and behind him the veiled and silent figure of a woman. After greeting the G.o.ds of his House, the King, in brief and stilted phrase, acknowledges the loyalty of the chorus, but hints at much that is amiss which it must be his first charge to set right.

Hereupon enters Clytemnestra, and in a speech of rhetorical exaggeration tells of her anxious waiting for her lord and her inexpressible joy at his return. In conclusion she directs that purple cloth be spread upon his path that he may enter the house as befits a conqueror. After a show of resistance, Agamemnon yields the point, and the contrast at which the dramatist aims is achieved. With the pomp of an eastern monarch, always repellent to the Greek mind, the King steps across the threshold, steps, as the audience knows, to his death. The higher the reach of his power and pride the more terrible and swift is the nemesis; and Clytemnestra follows in triumph with the enigmatic cry upon her lips: "Zeus who art G.o.d of fulfilment, fulfil my prayers." As she withdraws the chorus begin a song of boding fear, the more terrible that it is still indefinite.

Something is going to happen--the presentiment is sure. But what, but what? They search the night in vain. Meantime, motionless and silent waits the figure of the veiled woman. It is Ca.s.sandra, the prophetess, daughter of Priam of Troy, whom Agamemnon has carried home as his prize.

Clytemnestra returns to urge her to enter the house; she makes no sign and utters no word. The queen changes her tone from courtesy to anger and rebuke; the figure neither stirs nor speaks; and Clytemnestra at last with an angry threat leaves her and returns to the palace. Then, and not till then, a cry breaks from the stranger's lips, a pa.s.sionate cry to Apollo who gave her her fatal gift. All the sombre history of the House to which she has been brought, the woe that has been and the woe that is to come, pa.s.ses in pictures across her inner sense. In a series of broken e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns, not sentences but lyric cries, she evokes the scenes of the past and of the future. Blood drips from the palace; in its chambers the Furies crouch; the murdered sons of Thyestes wail in its haunted courts; and ever among the visions of the past that one of the future floats and fades, clearly discerned, impossible to avert, the murder of a husband by a wife; and in the rear of that, most pitiful of all, the violent death of the seer who sees in vain and may not help.

Between Ca.s.sandra and the Chorus it is a duet of anguish and fear; in the broken lyric phrases a phantom music wails; till at last, at what seems the breaking-point, the tension is relaxed, and dropping into the calmer iambic recitative, Ca.s.sandra tells her message in plainer speech and clearly proclaims the murder of the King. Then, with a last appeal to the avenger that is to come, she enters the palace alone to meet her death.--The stage is empty. Suddenly a cry is heard from within; again, and then again; while the chorus hesitate the deed is done; the doors are thrown open, and Clytemnestra is seen standing over the corpses of her victims. All disguise is now thrown off; the murderess avows and triumphs in her deed; she justifies it as vengeance for the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and sees in herself not a free human agent but the incarnate curse of the House of Tantalus. And now for the first time appears the adulterer Aegisthus, who has planned the whole behind the scenes. He too is an avenger, for he is the son of that Thyestes who was made to feed on his own children's flesh. The murder of Agamemnon is but one more link in the long chain of hereditary guilt; and with that exposition of the pitiless law of punishment and crime this chapter of the great drama comes to a close. But the "Agamemnon" is only the first of a series of three plays closely connected and meant to be performed in succession; and the problem raised in the first of them, the crime that cries for punishment and the punishment that is itself a new crime, is solved in the last by a reconciliation of the powers of heaven and h.e.l.l, and the pardon of the last offender in the person of Orestes. To sketch, however, the plan of the other dramas of the trilogy would be to trespa.s.s too far upon our s.p.a.ce and time. It is enough to have ill.u.s.trated, by the example of the "Agamemnon," the general character of a Greek tragedy; and those who care to pursue the subject further must be referred to the text of the plays themselves.

Section 7. Comedy.

Even more remarkable than the tragedy of the Greeks, in its rendering of a didactic intention under the forms of a free and spontaneous art, is the older comedy known to us through the works of Aristophanes. As the former dealt with the general conceptions, religious and ethical, that underlay the Greek view of life, using as its medium of exposition the ancient national myths, so the latter dealt with the particular phases of contemporary life, employing the machinery of a free burlesque. The achievement of Aristophanes, in fact, is more astonishing, in a sense, than that of Aeschylus. Starting with what is always, _prima facie_, the prose of everyday life, its acrid controversies, its vulgar and tedious types, and even its particular individuals--for Aristophanes does not hesitate to introduce his contemporaries in person on the stage--he fits to this gross and heavy stuff the wings of imagination, scatters from it the clinging mists of ba.n.a.lity and spite and speeds it forth through the lucid heaven of art amid peals of musical laughter and s.n.a.t.c.hes of lyric song. For Aristophanes was a poet as well as a comedian, and his genius is displayed not only in the construction of his fantastic plots, not only in the inexhaustible profusion of his humane and genial wit, but in bursts of pure poetry as melodious and inspired as ever sprang from the lips of the lyrists of Greece or of the world. The basis of the comic as of the tragic art of the Greeks was song and dance; and the chorus, the original element of the play, still retains in the works of Aristophanes a place important enough to make it clear that in comedy, too, a prominent aspect of the art must have been the aesthetic appeal to the ear and the eye. In general structure, in fact, comedy and tragedy were alike; aesthetically the motives were similar, only they were set in a different key.

But while primarily Aristophanes, like the tragedians, was a great artist, he was also, like them, a great interpreter of life. His dramas are satires as well as poems, and he was and expressed himself supremely conscious of having a "mission" to fulfil. "He has scorned from the first," he makes the chorus sing of himself in the "Peace":

"He has scorned from the first to descend and to dip Peddling and meddling in private affairs: To detect and collect every petty defect Of husband and wife and domestical life; But intrepid and bold, like Alcides of old, When the rest stood aloof, put himself to the proof In his country's behoof."

[Footnote: Aristoph. Peace, 751 seq.--Translated by Frere.]

His aim, in fact, was deliberately to instruct his countrymen in political and social issues; to attack the abuses of the a.s.sembly, of the Law-courts and the home; to punish demagogues, charlatans, professional politicians; to laugh back into their senses "revolting"

sons and wives; to defend the orthodox faith against philosophers and men of science. These are the themes that he embodies in his plots, and these the morals that he enforces when he speaks through the chorus in his own person. And the result is an art-product more strange to the modern mind in its union of poetry with prose, of aesthetic with didactic significance, than even that marvellous creation, the Greek tragedy. Of the character of this comedy the reader may form an idea through the admirable and easily accessible translations of Frere; [Footnote: In Morley's Universal Library.] and we are therefore dispensed from the obligation to attempt, as in the case of tragedy, an account of some particular specimen of the art.

Section 8. Summary.

And here must conclude our survey of the character of Greek art. The main point which we have endeavoured to make clear has been so often insisted upon, that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon it further. The key to the art of the Greeks, as well as to their ethics, is the identification of the beautiful and the good; and it therefore is as natural in treating of their art to insist on its ethical value as it was to insist on the aesthetic significance of their moral ideal. But, in fact, any insistance on either side of the judgment is misleading.

The two points of view had never been dissociated; and art and conduct alike proceeded from the same imperative impulse, to create a harmony or order which was conceived indifferently as beautiful or good. Through and through, the Greek ideal is Unity. To make the individual at one with the State, the real with the ideal, the inner with the outer, art with morals, finally to bring all phases of life under the empire of a single idea, which, with Goethe, we may call, as we will, the good, the beautiful, or the whole--this was the aim, and, to a great extent, the achievement of their genius. And of all the points of view from which we may envisage their brilliant activity none perhaps is more central and more characteristic than this of art, whose essence is the comprehension of the many in the one, and the perfect reflection of the inner in the outer.

CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

Now that we have examined in some detail the most important phases of the Greek view of life, it may be as well to endeavour briefly to recapitulate and bring to a point the various considerations that have been advanced.

But, first, one preliminary remark must be made. Throughout the preceding pages we have made no attempt to distinguish the Greek "view"

from the Greek "ideal"; we have interpreted their customs and inst.i.tutions, political, social, or religious, by the conceptions and ideals of philosophers and poets, and have thus, it may be objected, made the mistake of identifying the blind work of popular instinct with the theories and aspirations of conscious thought.

Such a procedure, no doubt, would be illegitimate if it were supposed to imply that Greek inst.i.tutions were the result of a deliberate intention consciously adopted and approved by the average man. Like other social products they grew and were not made; and it was only the few who realised fully all that they implied. But on the other hand it is a distinguishing characteristic of the Greek age that the ideal formulated by thought was the direct outcome of the facts. That absolute separation of what ought to be from what is which continues to haunt and vitiate modern life had not yet been made in ancient Greece. Plato, idealist though he be, is yet rooted in the facts of his age; his perfect republic he bases on the inst.i.tutions of Sparta and Crete; his perfect man he shapes on the lines of the Greek citizen. That dislocation of the spirit which opposed the body to the soul, heaven to earth, the church to the state, the man of the world to the priest, was altogether alien to the consciousness of the Greeks. To them the world of fact was also the world of the ideal; the conceptions which inspired their highest aims were already embodied in their inst.i.tutions and reflected in their life; and the realisation of what ought to be involved not the destruction of what was, but merely its perfecting on its own lines.

While then, on the one hand, it would be ridiculous so to idealise the civilisation of the Greeks as to imply that they had eliminated discord and confusion, yet, on the other, it is legitimate to say that they had built on the plan of the ideal, and that their life both in public and private was, by the very law of its existence, an effort to realise explicitly that type of Good which was already implicitly embodied in its structure.

The ideal, in a word, in ancient Greece, was organically related to the real; and that is why it is possible to identify the Greek view with the Greek ideal.

Bearing this in mind we may now proceed to recapitulate our conclusions as to what that view was. And, first, let us take the side of speculation. Here we are concerned not with the formal systems of Greek thought, but with that half-unconscious working of imagination as much as of mind whose expression was their popular religion. Of this religion, as we saw, the essential feature was that belief in anthropomorphic G.o.ds, by virtue of which a reconciliation was effected between man and the powers whether of nature or of his own soul. Behind phenomena, physical or psychic, beings were conceived of like nature with man, beings, therefore, whose actions he could interpret and whose motives he could comprehend. For his imagination, if not for his intellect, a harmony was thus induced between himself and the world that was not he. A harmony! and in this word we have the key to the dominant idea of the Greek civilisation.

For, turning now to the practical side, we find the same impulse to reconcile divergent elements. That ant.i.thesis of soul and body which was emphasised in the mediaeval view of life and dominates still our current ethical conceptions, does not appear in the normal consciousness of the Greeks. Their ideal for the individual life included the perfection of the body; beauty no less than goodness was the object of their quest, and they believed that the one implied the other. But since the perfection of the body required the co-operation of external aids, they made these also essential to their ideal. Not merely virtue of the soul, not merely health and beauty of the body, but n.o.ble birth, sufficient wealth and a good name among men, were included in their conception of the desirable life. Harmony, in a word, was the end they pursued, harmony of the soul with the body and of the body with its environment; and it is this that distinguishes their ethical ideal from that which in later times has insisted on the fundamental antagonism of the inner to the outer life, and made the perfection of the spirit depend on the mortification of the flesh.

The same ideal of harmony dominates the Greek view of the relation of the individual to the state. This relation, it is true, is often described as one in which the parts were subordinated to the whole; but more accurately it may be said that they were conceived as finding in the whole their realisation. The perfect individual was the individual in the state; the faculties essential to his excellence had there only their opportunity of development; the qualities defined as virtues had there only their significance; and it was only in so far as he was a citizen that a man was properly a man at all. Thus that opposition between the individual and the state which perplexes our own society had hardly begun to define itself in Greece. If on the one hand the state made larger claims on the liberty of the individual, on the other, the liberty of the individual consisted in a response to the claims. So that in this department also harmony was maintained by the Greeks between elements which have developed in modern times their latent antagonism.

Thus, both in speculation and in practice, in his relation to nature and in his relation to the state, both internally, between the divergent elements of which his own being was composed, and externally between himself and the world that was not he, it was the aim, conscious or unconscious, and, in part at least, the achievement of the Greeks, to create and maintain an essential harmony. The ant.i.theses of which we in our own time are so painfully and increasingly aware, between Man as a moral being and Nature as an indifferent law, between the flesh and the spirit, between the individual and the state, do not appear as factors in that dominant consciousness of the Greeks under whose influence their religion, their inst.i.tutions and their customary ideals had been formed.

And so regarded, in general, under what may fairly be called its most essential aspect, the Greek civilisation is rightly described as that of harmony.

But, on the other hand, and this is the point to which we must now turn our attention, this harmony which was the dominant feature in the consciousness of the Greeks and the distinguishing characteristic of their epoch in the history of the world, was nevertheless, after all, but a transitory and imperfect attempt to reconcile elements whose antagonism was too strong for the solution thus proposed. The factors of disruption were present from the beginning in the Greek ideal; and it was as much by the development of its own internal contradictions as by the invasion of forces from without that that fabric of magical beauty was destined to fall. These contradictions have already been indicated at various points in the text, and it only remains to bring them together in a concluding summary.

On the side of speculation, the religion of the Greeks was open, as we saw, to a double criticism. On the one hand, the ethical conceptions embodied in those legends of the G.o.ds which were the product of an earlier and more barbarous age, had become to the contemporaries of Plato revolting or ridiculous. On the other hand, to metaphysical speculation, not only was the existence of the G.o.ds unproved, but their mutually conflicting activities, their pa.s.sions and their caprice, were incompatible with that conception of universal law which the developing reason evolved as the form of truth. The reconciliation of man with nature which had been effected by the medium of anthropomorphic G.o.ds was a harmony only to the imagination, not to the mind. Under the action of the intellect the unstable combination was dissolved and the elements that had been thus imperfectly joined fell back into their original opposition. The religion of the Greeks was destroyed by the internal evolution of their own consciousness.

And in the sphere of practice we are met with a similar dissolution. The Greek conception of excellence included, as we saw, not only bodily health and strength, but such a share at least of external goods as would give a man scope for his own self-perfection. And since these conditions were not attainable by all, the sacrifice of the majority to the minority was frankly accepted and the pursuit of the ideal confined to a privileged cla.s.s.

Such a conception, however, was involved in internal contradictions. For in the first place, even for the privileged few, an excellence which depended on external aids was, at the best, uncertain and problematical.

Misfortune and disease were possibilities that could not be ignored; old age and death were imperative certainties; and no care, no art, no organisation of society, could obviate the inherent incompatibility of individual perfection with the course of nature. Harmony between the individual and his environment was perhaps more nearly achieved by and for the aristocracy of ancient Greece than by any society of any other age. But such a harmony, even at the best, is fleeting and precarious; and no perfection of life delivers from death.

And, in the second place, to secure even this imperfect realisation, it was necessary to restrict the universal application of the ideal.

Excellence, in Greece, was made the end for some, not for all. But this limitation was felt, in the development of consciousness, to be self- contradictory; and the next great system of ethics that succeeded to that of Aristotle, postulated an end of action that should be at once independent of the aids of fortune and open alike to all cla.s.ses of mankind. The ethics of a privileged cla.s.s were thus expanded into the ethics of humanity; but this expansion was fatal to its essence, which had depended on the very limitations by which it was destroyed.

With the Greek civilisation beauty perished from the world. Never again has it been possible for man to believe that harmony is in fact the truth of all existence. The intellect and the moral sense have developed imperative claims which can be satisfied by no experience known to man.

And as a consequence of this the goal of desire which the Greeks could place in the present, has been transferred, for us, to a future infinitely remote, which nevertheless is conceived as attainable.

Dissatisfaction with the world in which we live and determination to realise one that shall be better, are the prevailing characteristics of the modern spirit. The development is one into whose meaning and end this is not the place to enter. It is enough that we feel it to be inevitable; that the harmony of the Greeks contained in itself the factors of its own destruction; and that in spite of the fascination which constantly fixes our gaze on that fairest and happiest halting- place in the secular march of man, it was not there, any more than here, that he was destined to find the repose of that ultimate reconciliation which was but imperfectly antic.i.p.ated by the Greeks.