ÆGISTHUS: Where are the strangers who have brought us news of Orestes slain?
ELECTRA: Within. They have found a way to the heart of their hostess.
ÆGISTHUS: Can I look upon the corpse with my own eyes?
ELECTRA: You can indeed.
(The palace doors open. The shrouded corpse of CLYTEMNESTRA lies just within. ORESTES stands over it.)
ÆGISTHUS: Uncover the face that I, who was his kinsman, may pay my due tribute of mourning.
ORESTES: Do you yourself lift the veil.
ÆGISTHUS: So be it—but you, Electra, call me Clytemnestra if she is near.
ORESTES: She is. Look no farther for her.
(ÆGISTHUS lifts the face cloth.)
ÆGISTHUS: What do I see—
ORESTES: Why so terrified? Is the face strange to you?
The lifting of that cloth is a supreme theatrical touch. It is the great moment in the play. But the story Sophocles was dramatizing centered around a situation which could not be surpassed for dramatic opportunity, the murder of a mother by her son. No attention is focused on this fact in the play. When the son comes out after killing his mother, he and his sister agree briefly that it is well done, and turn instantly to the real climax, the killing of Ægisthus. Sophocles deliberately avoided the horror of that first murder. He substituted for it the righteous punishment of a murderer, a death that could move no one to pity and awe. “Thoughts too great for man,” he ever held, are not for man to utter. He had the sure instinct of the consummate artist: what was too tremendous ever to be done in finished perfection he would not attempt. The high passion that is needed for the very highest drama was not in him. He had a supreme gift of poetic expression, a great intellect, and an unsurpassed sureness of beautiful workmanship, but he did not rise to the heights where Æschylus and Shakespeare alone have walked.
XIV
Euripides
The Modern Mind
Euripides “with all his faults the most tragic of the poets,” said Aristotle, supreme among critics, whose claim to pronounce ever the final verdict has only of late been called into question. His judgment here points the latter-day attitude toward him: the great critic was wrong; he confused sadness and tragedy. Euripides is the saddest of the poets and for that very reason not the most tragic. A very great tragedian, beyond all question, one of the world’s four greatest, to all of whom belongs that strangest power, so to present the spectacle of pain that we are lifted to what we truly call the height of tragedy.
Euripides can indeed walk “those heights exalted” but the dark depths of pain are what he knows best. He is “the poet of the world’s grief.” He feels, as no other writer has felt, the pitifulness of human life, as of children suffering helplessly what they do not know and can never understand. No poet’s ear has ever been so sensitively attuned as his to the still, sad music of humanity, a strain little heeded by that world of long ago. And together with that, something then even more unheeded, the sense of the value of each individual human being. He alone of all the classic world so felt. It is an amazing phenomenon. Out of the pages written more than twenty-three hundred years ago sound the two notes which we feel are the dominants in our world to-day, sympathy with suffering and the conviction of the worth of everyone alive. A poet of the antique world speaks to us and we hear what seems peculiarly our own.
There is an order of mind which is perpetually modern. All those possessed of it are akin, no matter how great the lapse of time that separates them. When Professor Murray’s translations made Euripides popular in the early years of this century, what impressed people first of all was his astonishing modernity: he seemed to be speaking the very accent of 1900. To-day another generation who have little care for the brightest stars of those years, George Meredith, Henry James, any or all of the great later Victorians, read Euripides as belonging to them. So the younger generation in 400 B.C. felt, and so will they feel in many a century to come. Always those in the vanguard of their time find in Euripides an expression of their own spirit. He is the great exponent of the forever recurring modern mind.
This spirit, always in the world and always the same, is primarily a destructive spirit, critical not creative. “The life without criticism,” Plato says, “is not worthy to be lived.” The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world, who will not leave us to walk undisturbed in the ways of our fathers. The established order is always wrong to them. But there is criticism and criticism. Cynical criticism is totally opposed to the temper of the modern mind. The wise king who looked upon all the works that his hands had wrought and on all the labor that he had labored to do, and beheld that all was vanity and vexation of spirit, was not a modern mind. To read Ecclesiastes is to feel, “This is what men have always thought at times and will always think” it never carries the conviction, “This, just this is modern. It is the new note of today.” The same is true of Voltaire, that other wisest man and greatest critic, whose mighty pen shook the old unhappy things of his day until their foundations gave way. He is not a modern mind. His attitude, given in brief by his “Je ne sais pas ce que c’est que la vie éternelle, mais celle-ci est une mauvaise plaisanterie” is of another order. His is the critical intellect, directed upon human affairs but quite separated from “the human heart all ages live by,” and that is a separation the modern-minded know nothing of.
Above all, they care for human life and human things and can never stand aloof from them. They suffer for mankind, and what preoccupies them is the problem of pain. They are peculiarly sensitized to “the giant agony of the world.” What they see as needless misery around them and what they envisage as needless misery to come is intolerable to them. The world to them is made up of individuals, each with a terrible power to suffer, and the poignant pity of their own hearts precludes them from any philosophy in the face of this awful sum of pain and any capacity to detach themselves from it. They behold, first and foremost, that most sorrowful thing on earth, injustice, and they are driven by it to a passion of revolt. Convention, so often a mask for injustice, they will have none of, in their pursuit of justice at any cost they tear away veils that hide hateful things; they call into question all pleasant and comfortable things. They are not of those who take “all life as their province” what is good in the age they live in they do not regard; their eyes are fixed upon what is wrong. And yet they never despair. They are rebels, fighters. They will never accept defeat. It is this fact that gives them their profound influence, the fact that they who see so deep into wrong and misery and feel them so intolerable, never conclude the defeat of the mind of man.
Such a spirit, critical, subversive, destructive, is very rarely embodied in a poet. On the great secular scale of literature the modern minds for the most part are negligible. It is in the nature of things that it should be so. Genius moves to creation, not to destruction. Only a very few have combined both. Three hundred years before Euripides there was such a one, completely a modern mind, who felt, as no one has ever felt more, the pitifulness of human life and the intolerable wrong of human injustice, and whose eyes were keen to pierce beneath fair surfaces—the greatest prophet of Israel, Isaiah. A burning coal was placed upon his lips and he uttered the most magnificent indictment ever delivered against those who work evil, and, in words as beautifully tender as any ever spoken, the pity for those who suffer.
Isaiah stands with Euripides as the great example of the modern mind in literature. On every page he speaks his protest against the wrongdoing of men: “We look for judgment, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far off from us…and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter. Yea, truth faileth…. Everyone followeth after rewards; they judge not for the fatherless, neither doth the cause of the widow come into them, which justify the wicked for reward and grind the faces of the poor,…which call evil good and good evil…. If one look to the land, behold the light is darkened in the heavens, behold trouble a
nd darkness and dimness of anguish.”
Side by side with the burning of his anger appears the depth of his pity: “He hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted…. As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you…. Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee…. I, even I, am he that comforteth thee, to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house…. Oh, thou afflicted, tossed with tempest…in a little wrath I hid my face from thee but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy upon thee.”
Parallel passages in Euripides must not be sought for, or even passages strictly comparable; the method of writing is too unlike. Euripides’ indictment of evil is to be found not in this or that statement but in the entire body of his plays. The years of his manhood were the years of the great war between Athens and Sparta. His own country’s victories at first, her immensely spreading power, never dazzled his eyes. He looked at war and he saw through all the sham glory to the awful evil beneath and he wrote the Trojan Women—war as it appears to a handful of captive women waiting for the victors to carry them away to all that slavery means for women. The fall of Troy, the theme of the most glorious martial poetry ever written, ends in his play with one old broken-hearted woman, sitting on the ground, holding a dead child in her arms.
So too it is impossible to show adequately by quotation his spirit of tender compassion for all the unfortunate and his sense of the worth of human life. He sets a poor ignorant peasant beside a royal princess and shows him at least her equal in nobility. Not Plato, the idealist, would have done that. Slaves, who, in the antique scale of human values were not persons any more but only goods and chattels, stand forth in his pages justified, men among men. Euripides has another standard to measure by: “A man without fear cannot be a slave.” Old people, old women even and old slaves, completely negligible to the age he lived in, he touches with the deep pity of his perfect understanding. Hecuba remains with Lear the tenderest study in literature of desolate old age.
That spirit of compassionate love made him see deep into the human heart, deeper far than either of his two great predecessors. Not Æschylus, not Sophocles, nobody indeed but he himself, could have drawn the picture of utter pain so utterly human that closes the Trojan Women. The herald of the victorious Greeks comes to tell Andromache that her son is to be thrown from the wall of Troy. She speaks to the child:
Go, die, my best-beloved, my cherished one,
In fierce men’s hands, leaving me here alone.
…Weepest thou?
Nay, why, my little one? Thou canst not know.
And Father will not come; he will not come;
Not once, the great spear flashing, and the tomb
Riven to set thee free!
How shall it be? One horrible spring…deep, deep
Down. And thy neck…. Ah God, so cometh sleep?…
And none to pity thee! Thou little thing
That curlest in my arms, what sweet scents cling
All round thy neck! Belovéd; can it be
All nothing, that this bosom cradled thee
And fostered; all the weary nights, wherethrough
I watched upon thy sickness, till I grew
Wasted with watching? Kiss me. This one time;
Not ever again. Put up thine arms and climb
About my neck: now, kiss me, lips to lips….
Quick! take him: drag him: cast him from the wall,
If cast ye will! Tear him, ye beasts, be swift!
God hath undone me, and I cannot lift
One hand, one hand, to save my child from death.
When the little boy has been killed, his mother is gone, on her way to Greece in a Greek ship, and the dead body is brought to the grandmother, who holds it in her arms and speaks to it:
Ah, what a death hath found thee, little one.
…Poor little child!
Was it our ancient wall so savagely hath rent
Thy curls…here, where the bone-edge frayed
Grins white…Ah, God, I will not see!
Ye tender arms…how from the shoulder loose
Ye drop. And dear proud lips, so full of hope
And closed forever! What false words ye said
At daybreak, when he crept into my bed,
Called me kind names, and promised: “Grandmother,
When thou art dead I will cut close my hair,
And lead out all the captains to ride by
Thy tomb.”…’Tis I—old, homeless, childless,
That for thee, must shed cold tears.
These are no austere figures, awfully remote, lifted to heights of tragedy inaccessible. The human heart was what Euripides cared about, and the mythical princess and queen of far-fabled Troy have become suffering women, who feel what women everywhere have felt, their only throne that which sorrows build. A supreme master in human nature added those slight touches that bring them close to us: the sweet smell of the baby’s neck as the mother buried her face there for the last time; the old woman remembering the small boy climbing on to her bed of a morning to tell her how he would lead his captains out gloriously for her when she was dead. No tragic exaltation is here but the most poignant pain perhaps ever painted. Few passages in all the literature of pain can be set beside it.
The speculative side of the modern mind, the spirit that is forever examining and calling into question, is less easy to do justice to by quotation. In Isaiah it underlies all the denunciations, and the most cursory reading discovers it. Here and there, too, it finds expression in some isolated piece of acute critical judgment. His keen, questioning mind saw evils which even yet, after twenty-six hundred years, are not clearly seen as such: “Woe unto them that join field to field that they may be placed alone in the earth”—the evil of great landed estates given in brief, England’s land question to-day. Euripides’ well-known words about women in the Medea, familiar quotation to woman-suffragists so short a time ago, are a perfect parallel of farsighted criticism:
But we, they say, live a safe life at home,
While they, the men, go forth in arms to war.
Fools! Three times would I rather take my stand
With sword and shield than bring to birth one child.
But in truth the critical spirit is stamped upon Euripides as upon no other poet. He lived in a day when criticism was dominating more and more the thought in Athens. Life went at a rapid pace in that brilliant city, and the bare half century that separated Euripides from Æschylus saw astonishing changes. Signs of them are not to be sought for in Sophocles. Even though his long life did not end until a year or two after Euripides’ death, he belonged to an earlier day. Or rather is it true that Sophocles was aloof from the spirit of his age and would always have been so no matter what the age. He was first and last the artist, who looked at human beings apart from himself as subjects for his art and who took life as he found it. Passionate protest in face of the facts of life would have seemed to him the action of a child. “Such was the pleasure of the gods, angry, haply, at my race of old,” is the final comment of the innocent but blinded, blackened, ruined Œdipus. Questions where none could answer, Sophocles would not ask.
Over against him stand the other two, greatly different but akin. The spirit of inquiry dawning in Æschylus’ day had moved him, too, to wonder and surmise. He was never one to acquiesce in what he found because it was there. He, too, saw war with clear eyes, and Sophocles’ tranquil acceptance of “all Olympus’ faded hierarchy” was never possible to him. Completely a modern mind he was not. He would never, under no circumstances, in no age, have seen mankind as chiefly pitiable. Indeed pity was not a major emotion with him. He had the soldier’s temper which faces what is next to come with never a look back to mourn what is past. But even more than this, stamped upon his whole work is the conviction that human beings are capable of grandeur, and that calam
ity met greatly is justified. Passionate protest against the facts of life is no more to be found in him than in Sophocles, but for a totally different reason: a hero’s death awakens neither pity nor indignation.
Completely unlike him in this point, Euripides is nevertheless his spiritual son; he inherits directly from him, passing over Sophocles as though he had never been. Æschylus disregarded the current religion; Euripides directly attacked it. Again and again he shows up the gods in accordance with the popular conception of them, as lustful, jealous, moved by meanest motives, utterly inferior to the human beings they bring disaster upon, and he will have none of them: