The grief of Antigone is in perfect harmony with her character--it
betrays no repentance, no weakness--it is but the natural sorrow, of
youth and womanhood, going down to that grave which had so little of
hope in the old Greek religion. In an Antigone on our stage we might
have demanded more reference to her lover; but the Grecian heroine
names him not, and alludes rather to the loss of the woman's lot of
wedlock than the loss of the individual bridegroom. But it is not for
that reason that we are to conclude, with M. Schlegel and others, that
the Greek women knew not the sentiment of love. Such a notion, that
has obtained an unaccountable belief, I shall hereafter show to be at
variance with all the poetry of the Greeks--with their drama itself--
with their modes of life--and with the very elements of that human
nature, which is everywhere the same. But Sophocles, in the character
of Antigone, personifies duty, not passion. It is to this, her
leading individuality, that whatever might weaken the pure and statue-
like effect of the creation is sacrificed. As she was to her father,
so is she to her brother. The sorrows and calamities of her family
have so endeared them to her heart that she has room for little else.
"Formed," as she exquisitely says of herself, "to love, not to hate,"
[356] she lives but to devote affections the most sacred to sad and
pious tasks, and the last fulfilled, she has done with earth.
When Antigone is borne away, an august personage is presented to us,
whose very name to us, who usually read the Oedipus Tyrannus before
the Antigone, is the foreteller of omen and doom. As in the Oedipus
Tyrannus, Tiresias the soothsayer appears to announce all the terrors
that ensue--so now, at the crowning desolation of that fated house,
he, the solemn and mysterious surviver of such dark tragedies, is
again brought upon the stage. The auguries have been evil--birds
battle with each other in the air--the flame will not mount from the
sacrificial victim--and the altars and hearths are full of birds and
dogs, gathering to their feast on the corpse of Polynices. The
soothsayer enjoins Creon not to war against the dead, and to accord
the rites of burial to the prince's body. On the obstinate refusal of
Creon, Tiresias utters prophetic maledictions and departs. Creon,
whose vehemence of temper is combined with a feeble character, and
strongly contrasts the mighty spirit of Oedipus, repents, and is
persuaded by the chorus to release Antigone from her living prison, as
well as to revoke the edict which denies sepulture to Polynices. He
quits the stage for that purpose, and the chorus burst into one of
their most picturesque odes, an Invocation to Bacchus, thus
inadequately presented to the English reader.
"Oh thou, whom earth by many a title hails,
Son of the thunder-god, and wild delight
Of the wild Theban maid!
Whether on far Italia's shores obey'd,
Or where Eleusis joins thy solemn rites
With the great mother's [357], in mysterious vales--
Bacchus in Bacchic Thebes best known,
Thy Thebes, who claims the Thyads as her daughters;
Fast by the fields with warriors dragon-sown,
And where Ismenus rolls his rapid waters.
It saw thee, the smoke,
On the horned height--[358]
It saw thee, and broke
With a leap into light;
Where roam Corycian nymphs the glorious mountain,
And all melodious flows the old Castalian fountain
Vocal with echoes wildly glad,
The Nysian steeps with ivy clad,
And shores with vineyards greenly blooming,
Proclaiming, steep to shore,
That Bacchus evermore
Is guardian of the race,
Where he holds his dwelling-place
With her [359], beneath the breath
Of the thunder's glowing death,
In the glare of her glory consuming.
Oh now with healing steps along the slope
Of loved Parnassus, or in gliding motion,
O'er the far-sounding deep Euboean ocean--
Come! for we perish--come!--our Lord and hope!
Leader of the stately choir
Of the great stars, whose very breath is light,
Who dost with hymns inspire
Voices, oh youngest god, that sound by night;
Come, with thy Maenad throng,
Come with the maidens of thy Naxian isle,
Who chant their Lord Bacchus--all the while
Maddening, with mystic dance, the solemn midnight long!"
At the close of the chorus the Nuntius enters to announce the
catastrophe, and Eurydice, the wife of Creon, disturbed by rumours
within her palace, is made an auditor of the narration. Creon and his
train, after burying Polynices, repair to the cavern in which Antigone
had been immured. They hear loud wailings within "that unconsecrated
chamber"--it is the voice of Haemon. Creon recoils--the attendants
enter--within the cavern they behold Antigone, who, in the horror of
that deathlike solitude, had strangled herself with the zone of her
robe; and there was her lover lying beside, his arms clasped around
her waist. Creon at length advances, perceives his son, and conjures
him to come forth.
"Then, glaring on his father with wild eyes,
The son stood dumb, and spat upon his face,
And clutched the unnatural sword--the father fled,
And, wroth, as with the arm that missed a parent,
The wretched man drove home unto his breast
The abhorrent steel; yet ever, while dim sense
Struggled within the fast-expiring soul--
Feebler, and feebler still, his stiffening arms
Clung to that virgin form--and every gasp
Of his last breath with bloody dews distained
The cold white cheek that was his pillow. So
Lies death embracing death!" [360]
In the midst of this description, by a fine stroke of art, Euridice,
the mother of Haemon, abruptly and silently quits the stage [361].
When next we hear of her, she has destroyed herself, with her last
breath cursing her husband as the murderer of her child. The end of
the play leaves Creon the surviver. He himself does not perish, for
he himself has never excited our sympathies [362]. He is punished
through his son and wife--they dead, our interest ceases in him, and
to add his death to theirs and to that of Antigone would be bathos.
VIII. In the tragedy of "Electra," the character of the heroine
stands out in the boldest contrast to the creation of the Antigone;
both are endowed with surpassing majesty and strength of nature--they
are loftier than the daughters of men, their very loveliness is of an
age when gods were no distant ancestors of kings--when, as in the
early sculptors of Pallas, or even of Aphrodite, something of the
severe and stern was deemed necessary to the realization of the
divine; and the beautiful had not lost the colossal proportions of the
sublime. But the strength and heroism of Antigone is derived from
love--love, sober, serene, august--but still love. Electra, on the
contrary, is supported and exalted above her sex by the might of her
hatred. Her father, "the king of men," foully murdered in his palace
--herself compelled to consort with his assassins--to receive from
their hands both charity and insult--the adulterous murderer on her
father's throne, and lord of her father's marriage bed [363]--her
brother a wanderer and an outcast. Such are the thoughts unceasingly
before her!--her heart and soul have for years fed upon the bitterness
of a resentment, at once impotent and intense, and nature itself has
turned to gall. She sees not in Clytemnestra a mother, but the
murderess of a father. The doubt and the compunction of the modern
Hamlet are unknown to her more masculine spirit. She lives on but in
the hope of her brother's return and of revenge. The play opens with
the appearance of Orestes, Pylades, and an old attendant--arrived at
break of day at the habitation of the Pelopidae--"reeking with blood"
--the seats of Agamemnon. Orestes, who had been saved in childhood by
his sister from the designs of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, has now
returned in manhood. It is agreed that, in order to lull all
suspicion in the royal adulterers, a false account of the death of
Orestes by an accident in the Pythian Games shall be given to
Clytemnestra; and Orestes and Pylades themselves are afterward to be
introduced in the character of Phocians, bearing the ashes of the
supposed dead. Meanwhile the two friends repair to the sepulchre of
Agamemnon to offer libations, etc. Electra then appears, indulges her
indignant lamentations at her lot, and consoles herself with the hope
of her brother's speedy return.
She is joined by her sister Chrysothemis, who is bearing sepulchral
offerings to the tomb of Agamemnon; and in this interview Sophocles,
with extraordinary skill and deep knowledge of human nature, contrives
to excite our admiration and sympathy for the vehement Electra by
contrasting her with the weak and selfish Chrysothemis. Her very
bitterness against her mother is made to assume the guise of a solemn
duty to her father. Her unfeminine qualities rise into courage and
magnanimity--she glories in the unkindness and persecution she meets
with from Clytemnestra and Aegisthus--they are proofs of her reverence
to the dead. Woman as she is, she is yet the daughter of a king--she
cannot submit to a usurper--"she will not, add cowardice to misery."
Chrysothemis informs Electra that on the return of Aegisthus it is
resolved to consign her to a vault" where she may chant her woes
unheard." Electra learns the meditated sentence undismayed--she will
not moderate her unwelcome wo--"she will not be a traitoress to those
she loves." But a dream has appalled Clytemnestra--Agamemnon has
appeared to her as in life. In the vision he seemed to her to fix his
sceptre on the soil, whence it sprouted up into a tree that
overshadowed the whole land. Disquieted and conscience-stricken, she
now sends Chrysothemis with libations to appease the manes of the
dead. Electra adjures Chrysothemis not to render such expiations to
scatter them to the winds or on the dust--to let them not approach the
resting-place of the murdered king. Chrysothemis promises to obey the
injunction, and departs. A violent and powerful scene between
Clytemnestra and Electra ensues, when the attendant enters (as was
agreed on) to announce the death of Orestes. In this recital he
portrays the ceremony of the Pythian races in lines justly celebrated,
and which, as an animated and faithful picture of an exhibition so
renowned, the reader may be pleased to see, even in a feeble and cold
translation. Orestes had obtained five victories in the first day--in
the second he starts with nine competitors in the chariot-race--an
Achaean, a Spartan, two Libyans--he himself with Thessalian steeds--a
sixth from Aetolia, a Magnesian, an Enian, an Athenian, and a Boeotian
complete the number.
"They took their stand where the appointed judges
Had cast their lots, and ranged the rival cars;
Rang out the brazen trump! Away they bound,
Cheer the hot steeds and shake the slackened reins
As with a body the large space is filled
With the huge clangour of the rattling cars:
High whirl aloft the dust-clouds; blent together
Each presses each--and the lash rings--and loud
Snort the wild steeds, and from their fiery breath,
Along their manes and down the circling wheels,
Scatter the flaking foam. Orestes still,
Ay, as he swept around the perilous pillar
Last in the course, wheel'd in the rushing axle,
The left rein curbed--that on the dexter hand
Flung loose. So on erect the chariots rolled!
Sudden the Aenian's fierce and headlong steeds
Broke from the bit--and, as the seventh time now
The course was circled, on the Libyan car
Dash'd their wild fronts: then order changed to ruin:
Car crashed on car--the wide Crissaean plain
Was, sealike, strewn with wrecks: the Athenian saw,
Slackened his speed, and, wheeling round the marge,
Unscathed and skilful, in the midmost space,
Left the wild tumult of that tossing storm.
Behind, Orestes, hitherto the last,
Had yet kept back his coursers for the close;
Now one sole rival left--on, on he flew,
And the sharp sound of the impelling scourge
Rang in the keen ears of the flying steeds.
He nears--he reaches--they are side by side
Now one--the other--by a length the victor.
The courses all are past--the wheels erect
All safe--when as the hurrying coursers round
The fatal pillar dash'd, the wretched boy
Slackened the left rein; on the column's edge
Crash'd the frail axle--headlong from the car,
Caught and all meshed within the reins he fell;
And masterless, the mad steeds raged along!
Loud from that mighty multitude arose
A shriek--a shout! But yesterday such deeds
To-day such doom! Now whirled upon the earth,
Now his limbs dash'd aloft, they dragged him--those
Wild horses--till all gory from the wheels
Released--and no man, not his nearest friends,
Could in that mangled corpse have traced Orestes.
They laid the body on the funeral pyre,
And while we speak, the Phocian strangers bear,
In a small, brazen, melancholy urn,
That handful of cold ashes to which all
The grandeur of the beautiful hath shrunk.
Hither they bear him--in his father's land
To find that heritage--a tomb!"
It is much to be regretted that this passage, so fine in the original,
is liable to one great objection--it has no interest as connected with
the play, because the audience know that Orestes is not dead; and
though the description of the race retains its animation, the report
of the catastrophe loses the terror of reality, and appears but a
highly-coloured and elaborate falsehood.
The reader will conceive the lamentations of Electra and the fearful
joy of Clytemnestra at a narrative by which the one appears to lose a
brother and a friend--the other a son and an avenging foe.
Chrysothemis joyfully returns to announce, that by the tomb of
Agamemnon she discovers a lock of hair; libations yet moisten the
summit of the mound, and flowers of every hue are scattered over the
grave. "These," she thinks, "are signs that Orestes is returned."
Electra, informing her of the fatal news, proposes that they, women as
they are, shall attempt the terrible revenge which their brother can
no longer execute. When Chrysothemis recoils and refuses, Electra
still nurses the fell design. The poet has more than once, and now
again with judgment, made us sensible of the mature years of Electra
[364]; she is no passionate, wavering, and inexperienced girl, but the
eldest born of the house; the guardian of the childhood of its male
heir; unwedded and unloving, no soft matron cares, no tender maiden
affections, have unbent the nerves of her stern, fiery, and
concentrated soul. Year after year has rolled on to sharpen her
hatred--to disgust her with the present--to root her to one bloody
memory of the past--to sour and freeze up the gentle thoughts of
womanhood--to unsex
"And fill her from the crown to the toe, topful
Of direst cruelty--make thick her blood
Stop up the access and passage to remorse," [365]
and fit her for one crowning deed, for which alone the daughter of the
king of men lives on.
At length the pretended Phocians enter, bearing the supposed ashes of
Orestes; the chief of the train addresses himself to Electra, and this
is the most dramatic and touching scene in the whole tragedy. When
the urn containing, as she believes, the dust of her brother, is
placed in the hands of Electra, we can well overleap time and space,
and see before us the great actor who brought the relics of his own
son upon the stage, and shed no mimic sorrows [366]--we can well
picture the emotions that circle round the vast audience--pity itself
being mingled with the consciousness to which the audience alone are
admitted, that lamentation will soon be replaced by joy, and that the
living Orestes is before his sister. It is by a most subtle and
delicate art that Sophocles permits this struggle between present pain
and anticipated pleasure, and carries on the passion of the spectators
to wait breathlessly the moment when Orestes shall be discovered. We
now perceive why the poet at once, in the opening of the play,
announced to us the existence and return of Orestes--why he disdained
the vulgar source of interest, the gross suspense we should have felt,
if we had shared the ignorance of Electra, and not been admitted to
the secret we impatiently long to be communicated to her. In this
scene, our superiority to Electra, in the knowledge we possess,
refines and softens our compassion, blending it with hope. And most
beautifully here does Sophocles remove far from us the thought of the
hard hatred that hitherto animates the mourner--the strong, proud
spirit is melted away--the woman and the sister alone appear. He whom
she had loved more dearly than a mother--whom she had nursed, and
saved, and prayed for, is "a nothing" in her hands; and the last rites
it had not been hers to pay. He had been
"By strangers honoured and by strangers mourned."
All things had vanished with him--"vanished in a day"--"vanished as by
a hurricane"--she is left with her foes alone. "Admit me" (she
cries), "to thy refuge--make room for me in thy home."
In these lamentations, the cold, classic drama seems to warm into
actual life. Art, exquisite because invisible, unites us at once with
imperishable nature--we are no longer delighted with Poetry--we are
weeping with Truth.
At length Orestes reveals himself, and now the plot draws to its
catastrophe. Clytemnestra is alone in her house, preparing a caldron
for the burial; Electra and the chorus are on the stage; the son--the
avenger, is within; suddenly the cries of Clytemnestra are heard.
Again--again! Orestes re-enters a parricide! [367] He retires as
Aegisthus is seen approaching; and the adulterous usurper is now
presented to us for the first and last time--the crowning victim of
the sacrifice. He comes flushed with joy and triumph. He has heard
that the dreaded Orestes is no more. Electra entertains him a few
moments with words darkly and exultingly ambiguous. He orders the
doors to be thrown open, that all Argos and Mycenae may see the
remains of his sole rival for the throne. The scene opens. On the
threshold (where, with the Greeks, the corpse of the dead was usually
set out to view) lies a body covered with a veil or pall. Orestes
(the supposed Phocian) stands beside.
"Aegisthus. Great Jove! a grateful spectacle!--if thus
May it be said unsinning; yet if she,
The awful Nemesis, be nigh and hear,
I do recall the sentence! Raise the pall.
The dead was kindred to me, and shall know
A kinsman's sorrow.
Orestes. Lift thyself the pall;
Not mine, but thine, the office to survey
That which lies mute beneath, and to salute,
Lovingly sad, the dead one.
Aegisthus. Be it so--
It is well said. Go thou and call the queen:
Is she within?
Orestes. Look not around for her--
She is beside thee!"
Aegisthus lifts the pall, and beholds the body of Clytemnestra! He
knows his fate at once. He knows that Orestes is before him. He
attempts to speak. The fierce Electra cuts him short, and Orestes,
with stern solemnity, conducts him from the stage to the spot on which
Aegisthus had slain Agamemnon, so that the murderer might die by the
son's hand in the place where the father fell. Thus artistically is
the catastrophe not lessened in effect, but heightened, by removing
the deed of death from the scene--the poetical justice, in the calm
and premeditated selection of the place of slaughter, elevates what on
the modern stage would be but a spectacle of physical horror into the
deeper terror and sublimer gloom of a moral awe; and vindictive
murder, losing its aspect, is idealized and hallowed into religious
sacrifice.
IX. Of the seven plays left to us, "The Trachiniae" is usually
considered the least imbued with the genius of Sophocles; and Schlegel
has even ventured on the conjecture, singularly destitute of even
plausible testimony, that Sophocles himself may not be the author.
The plot is soon told. The play is opened by Deianira, the wife of
Hercules, who indulges in melancholy reflections on the misfortunes of
her youth, and the continual absence of her husband, of whom no
tidings have been heard for months. She soon learns from her son,
Hyllus, that Hercules is said to be leading an expedition into Euboea;
and our interest is immediately excited by Deianira's reply, which
informs us that oracles had foretold that this was to be the crisis
[368] in the life of Hercules--that he was now to enjoy rest from his
labours, either in a peaceful home or in the grave; and she sends
Hyllus to join his father, share his enterprise and fate. The chorus
touchingly paint the anxious love of Deianira in the following lines:
"Thou, whom the starry-spangled Night did lull
Into the sleep from which--her journey done
Her parting steps awake thee--beautiful
Fountain of flame, oh Sun!
Say, on what seagirt strand, or inland shore
(For earth is bared before thy solemn gaze),
In orient Asia, or where milder rays
Tremble on western waters, wandereth he
Whom bright Alcmena bore?
Ah! as some bird within a lonely nest
The desolate wife puts sleep away with tears;
And ever ills to be
Haunting the absence with dim hosts of fears,
Fond fancy shapes from air dark prophets of the breast."
In her answer to the virgin chorus, Deianira weaves a beautiful
picture of maiden youth as a contrast to the cares and anxieties of
wedded life:
"Youth pastures in a valley of its own;
The scorching sun, the rains and winds of Heaven,
Mar not the calm--yet virgin of all care;
But ever with sweet joys it buildeth up
The airy halls of life."
Deianira afterward receives fresh news of Hercules. She gives way to
her joy. Lichas, the herald, enters, and confides to her charge some
maidens whom the hero had captured. Deianira is struck with
compassion for their lot, and with admiration of the noble bearing of
one of them, Iole. She is about to busy herself in preparation for
their comfort, when she learns that Iole is her rival--the beloved
mistress of Hercules. The jealousy evinced by Deianira is beautifully
soft and womanly [369]. Even in uttering a reproach on Hercules, she
says she cannot feel anger with him, yet how can she dwell in the same
house with a younger and fairer rival;
"She in whose years the flower that fades in mine
Opens the leaves of beauty."
Her affection, her desire to retain the love of the hero, suggests to
her remembrance a gift she had once received from a centaur who had
fallen by the shaft of Hercules. The centaur had assured her that the
blood from his wound, if preserved, would exercise the charm of a
filter over the heart of Hercules, and would ever recall and fix upon
her his affection. She had preserved the supposed charm--she steeps
with it a robe that she purposes to send to Hercules as a gift; but
Deianira, in this fatal resolve, shows all the timidity and sweetness
of her nature; she even questions if it be a crime to regain the heart
of her husband; she consults the chorus, who advise the experiment
(and here, it may be observed, that this is skilfully done, for it
conveys the excuse of Deianira, the chorus being, as it were, the
representative of the audience). Accordingly, she sends the garment
by Lichas. Scarce has the herald gone, ere Deianira is terrified by a
strange phenomenon: a part of the wool with which the supposed filter
had been applied to the garment was thrown into the sunlight, upon
which it withered away--"crumbling like sawdust"--while on the spot
where it fell a sort of venomous foam froths up. While relating this
phenomenon to the chorus, her son, Hyllus, returns [370], and relates
the agonies of his father under the poisoned garment: he had indued
the robe on the occasion of solemn sacrifice, and all was rejoicing,
when,
"As from the sacred offering and the pile
The flame broke forth,"
the poison began to work, the tunic clung to the limbs of the hero,
glued as if by the artificer, and, in his agony and madness, Hercules
dashes Lichas, who brought him the fatal gift, down the rock, and is
now on his way home. On hearing these news and the reproaches of her
son, Deianira steals silently away, and destroys herself upon the
bridal-bed. The remainder of the play is very feeble. Hercules is
represented in his anguish, which is but the mere raving of physical
pain; and after enjoining his son to marry Iole (the innocent cause of
his own sufferings), and to place him yet living upon his funeral
pyre, the play ends.
The beauty of the "Trachiniae" is in detached passages, in some
exquisite bursts by the chorus, and in the character of Deianira,
whose artifice to regain the love of her consort, unhappily as it
terminates, is redeemed by a meekness of nature, a delicacy of
sentiment, and an anxious, earnest, unreproachful devotion of conjugal
love, which might alone suffice to show the absurdity of modern
declamations on the debasement of women, and the absence of pure and
true love in that land from which Sophocles drew his experience.
X. The "Ajax" is far superior to the "Trachiniae." The subject is
one that none but a Greek poet could have thought of or a Greek
audience have admired. The master-passion of a Greek was emulation--
the subject of the "Ajax" is emulation defeated. He has lost to
Ulysses the prize of the arms of Achilles, and the shame of being
vanquished has deprived him of his senses.
