: awful character. In fact the strongest evi-, in cutting her down: nay, her dear Orestes dence against her, until this time, is to be had been taken from her, from some vague drawn from her extreme and anxious self- anticipation of his being hanged or depos exculpations. Methinks, the lady doth pro- ed, we are not sure which. And as for test too much and her whole appearance tears, they must not be surprised that she is, as it is intended to be, that of a person sheds none; she has none left; the very talking at random to conceal her thoughts, fount of them is dry! But her eyes are or occasionally venting them obscurely, as sore (if this will do as well) with weeping if in demi-soliloquy. And then, what an by unsnuffed candles (so we presume to array of crimes we have, brought up against translate τὰς ἀμφὶ σοῦ κλαίουσα λαμπληρουχίας άτηKing Agamemnon, and with what skill perous év); and the very 'buzzing nightmarshalled! His very entrance, accompa- flies' had kept her awake instead of 'hushnied by the captive Cassandra, carries his ing her to her slumbers.' But now, it is wife back to all the infidelities of his ab- all past: Agamemnon is come! And now sence, while she forsooth, poor bird, was that he is come, what shall she say, what pining in her widowed nest at home. And shall she call him? A house-dog--a cable in truth it does remind one vividly of the -a pillar--an only child--a friendly shore naïveté of the Homeric King of Men, who -a fair day—a running stream! His very tells us that Chryseis was no whit inferior foot is a glorious foot, for it spurned Troy to his wedded wife; and that, therefore, he over; and it must not tread upon the earth.* naturally preferred her : All this Agamemnon takes meekly; protesting indeed against the splendour of his reception, as well as the length of her speech,-which latter he compares to the siege of Troy; but giving way at last, for the sake of a quiet life. — καὶ γίρ ρα Κλυταιμνήστρας προβίβουλα, κουριδίης αλόχου ἐπεὶ οὐ 10 ori X ρείων. οὐ δέμας, οὐδὲ φυήν, οὔτ' ἂρ φρένας, οὔτε τι ἔργα. Again the slaughter (for in Eschylus we hear nothing of Iphigenia in Tauris) of his eldest child as the victim of his brother's uxoriousness and his own ambition, is, not unnaturally, much and variously dwelt upon; until at last the picture of the murdered maiden welcoming to the banks of Acheron the father who had sacrificed her (v. 1503), makes the student feel the triumph of the poet in having, for a moment, trimmed the balance between the parties; though there is nothing in the perplexity thus produced which can permanently pervert the judgment. Again, let the Queen's inflated language, and the insidious pomp of Agamemnon's reception, be noticed. Here is no deviation from nature; rather, under her circumstances, it is the highest nature;—but the effect is, for the time, to throw a shade of caricature over all his greatness and his person. All is forced to such an excess as to provoke reaction. She has become bold in length of time to tell her love-tale in the public ear; and an invidious one it is of a disconsolate, deserted wife, weeping to hear story after story of her husband's death, until his body had been (said to be) thrice over drilled with eyelet-wounds like a net, and himself-had he been three gentlemen at once-buried thrice deep! Forgotten and woeful matron, she had done nothing but weave herself halters, and her maidens had had their time fully occupied * Cf. v. 349, etc. ! It may doubtless be said that this is ludicrous; so, in itself, it undoubtedly is: but how true to nature, and how wonderfully contrived to further the poet's purpose Let us take Macbeth: if, at least, we may be forgiven for venturing, against certain modern authorities, to retain our belief that there is a family likeness between Lady Macbeth and Clytemnestra. She, indeed, is more sparing of her rhetoric; but in her speech of welcome to Duncan there is the same frigid elaborateness: with both of them alike all is In every point twice done, and then done double.' In the same taste is that earlier speech of Clytemnestra, wherein the description of the courier flame, which announced the capture of Troy, is worked up with the most marvellous union of real excitement and perturbation, with cold and inflated bombast. In a modern work, which has fallen into our hands in the course of our professional labours as the scavengers of literature,' we have found it authoritatively remarked, that it is the orthodox custom of translators to render the dialogue of • The reader can hardly have forgotten the parody on this in the Knights of Aristophanes (v. 783 sey.) ἐπὶ ταῖσι πέτραις οὐ φροντίζει σκληρῶς σε καθήμενον οὕτως, οὐχ ὥσπερ ἐγὼ ραψάμενος σοι τουτὶ φέρω ἀλλ' ἐπαναίρου, κατα καθίζου μαλακῶς, ἵνα μὴ τρίβῃς τὴν ἐν Σαλαμῖνι, Greek plays in blank verse; but in this instance the whole animation and rapidity of the original would be utterly lost in the stiff construction and protracted rhythm of blank verse!' Alas for Shakspeare then! Alas for Eschylus, who--though the whole range of rapid' and 'animated' choral metres was before him-chose so unac countably to clothe this speech in a metre adopted, as Aristotle tells us, because it was the most proselike, the most like common discourse, of all! Alas for the lyrical translator, who has to soften down into 'animated and rapid' phraseology such expressions as 'old-womanish heather' (ypaia ipeikn), a huge beard of flame' (ploys μéyav wywva), and the like, and especially that glorious description of the last beacon, οὐκ ἄπαππον Ἰδαίου πυρός— which, to translate accurately, 'is not un-grandfather'd by Ida's fire!' Are we disparaging Eschylus by show ing that among the fervid thoughts of this speech there are such frigid tropes intermingled? Quite the reverse; because we believe it to be natural, and that he knew it, to one in Clytemnestra's situation, to use such language instead of the gay prettiness of our modern Midas, who turns every thing that he touches to-tinsel. To estimate her character, we must compare her language before and after the deed was done. Afterwards there is no elaboration, no disguise, no frigidity. Every word burns,-burus with hell-fire. Public and private ills have converged on the heads of 'Here's a present you'll prize: come, arise, sir, arise! Then sit you down softly upon her: Since Salamis' shock, what a shame the hard rock Should be chafing the seat-of your Honour !' Ah! soon alive, to miss and (I. e., as a note tells us, Menelaus, as lean as a ghost!) Her statues meet, as round they rise, Hath swept the Venus from her face! the Atrida; or rather-for the historical account of the shipwreck is ably applied to withdraw Menelaus-on the one head of Agamemnon. And she stands forth as the Até within the family, as Ægisthus from without; and this, rather than their illicit love (which, in fact, flows from it), is the bond of their unhallowed union. This forms one means by which a catastrophe is prepared. But a still more important agent is the Chorus; and this is so employed by Eschylus as to need a more careful analysis. It was not (says the fine old Platonist, Philip van Heusde) merely by the outward improvements in his art, which we learn from Horace and the archæologers, that Æschylus did his work. It was by the masterpieces of his tragedy, the deep impression which they made on the spectator, filling him now with pity, now with terror, but always with elevating emotions. And this he attained, not by action and language, but most chiefly by the influence of the chorus. The tragedian was also probably the first lyric poet of Greece; and thus by the chorus in the up the souls of his hearers to the pitch of pauses of his dramas his aim was to work the tragedy which they were hearing, and to inspire them with a capacity for the feelings which were to be called forth. It is to this chorus that we chiefly trace the higher spirit which possesses us when we study the Greek tragedy:— Ille bonis faveatque, et concilietur amicis; It is remarked by Schlegel, that the Greek chorus is the idealised spectator, giving the fair comments of man's judgment in the abstract upon the acts or sentiments of the characters, and so, by the impersonal character of its moralising, gently leading the audience to do the like. But this is not a sufficient description of the chorus in Eschylus. With him it is no mere external critic upon the plot; it is the plot itself. The dialogue of the Agamemnon could be dispensed with as easily as the lyric portion of it. The chorus is no critical looker-on; it is the poet soliloquising at his work, and giving vent, as in involuntary strains, to the mysterious imaginations which crowd upon his soul, while he strives to embody them in their more definite, but thus less spiritual form. Without the chorus we could no more attain to the fulness of the poet's meaning than we could attune ourselves to the harmonies in which he clothes it. The chorus is altogether rapt out of the region of reflection. It is inspired. It will be worth while to trace the clue of their strains through the earlier part of the play, from their entrance, summoned by Clytemnestra to hear the news of the triumph which has been telegraphed from Troy. This carries them back ten years, to the time when the Atridæ departed, shouting for vengeance on Troy, like vultures wheeling over their empty nest, 'Right sorrowfully mourning their bereaved cares.' Well! things must be as they may; and destiny and wrath will have their course; but our way of life is in the sere (pulados hôn kaтakappoμévns), we linger on, unmeaning as a dream at mid-day.' tell the rest; but this is sure, that prophecy will work its way, and those that will not learn, shall learn by suffering. But away with inquiries into the future. Enough that it will come, surely and speedily! After hearing what the queen has to tell them of the conquest, and her rambling strain of moralizing upon it, they again take up their parable, their theme being the sin of Troy and the certainty of judgment. But mark whither this leads them! : Zeus has bent his bow against the guilty. Ay, though men are found to say that the gods reck not of evil deeds, it was his doing: he shows himself in vengeance to the sons of an overweening race. Ours be the lowlier lot which knows no ill; for there is no redemption for the high and wealthy ones who spurn the altar of right. They are driven on to inevitable ill: the light within has ceased to be of heaven, but Yet old as they are, the spirit of song blazes lurid forth, hurrying them downsurvives; and now the fated time suggests wards; and no one hears their prayer, but the strain,-how omens met the avengers mischief hunts the man who for a toy, a on their way. And this was the rede of bird of gay plumage, transgresses. And the prophet: time will come when Troy even such a bird was Helen! Lightly she shall fall before the host; but a hostile glided from her home, leaving a legacy beinfluence darkens the future: the goddess hind her, the clash of arms and the battle of the wild-wood tribes is at the throne of stir,-bearing with her a dowry, ruin to Zeus to ask the fulfilment of the sign, Troy. . . . And he, the dishonoured, the prosperous in the main, yet deeply dashed unreproaching! Silent is he he cannot with ill (δεξιὰ μέν, κατάμομφα δέ). Heaven deem her gone: her form will haunt him forefend that she demand a horrid sacrifice yet in every hall where she has reigned as -horrid in itself, and source of future horror, treachery, and domestic vengeance. Sing woe, sing woe, and well away! (αἴλινον, αἴλινον εἰπέ, τὸ δ' εὖ νικάτω) . . . A weight is on their soul, and who shall relieve them? The ancient powers of heaven are gone by; only Zeus remains; and he has ordained that by suffering shall mortals be taught to bow beneath the rod. Thus was his hand on Agamemnon, what time the host pined away to watch day after day the refluent waters of Euripus. But the remedy was worse than all; the monarch smote the earth and cried, 'A sorry choice! It is hard to disobey! and how hard to shed a virgin daughter's blood! and yet I owe a duty to my comrades; and must they not demand it?' Then he bowed to the yoke of fate, and steeled himself to dare the worst; for in the first guilt madness lies, and hardens man to recklessness; and so he set at naught his daughter's prayer and appeals to a father's name; muffling the curses which might fall from that melodious tongue, which had so often charmed the guests of his palace-hall; for there she stood as if in act to speak, fair as some pictured form, darting her glances round in pitiful appeal.. ... We saw not, dare not queen: all else in them is a blank; for the desire of his eyes is gone, and what is loveliness to him? In dreams he snatches an empty joy, and lo the vision is gone with the slumber! . . . But private sorrows are not all. There is a cry of mourning through universal Greece. Men ask for their children, and what have they? Ashes and an urn! And when they tell of this man's courage and that man's death, there comes the murmur, that it was all for one frail wife! Far off sleep the beautiful; but whispers deepen into curses here at home,-curses which fall not to the ground; for blood will have blood; and glory overmuch is not for good, but calls heaven's lightning down. Ours be no such fortune, but rather the unenvied lot, unharmed, unharming! Up to this point, at which the chorus seems to be interrupted by a shout of the citizens without, welcoming the arrival of the herald, we can clearly trace the idea of the drama in the lovely ode, which, for critical purposes, we have so rudely anatomized. The chorus endeavour to wake the song of triumph over Troy; but they are impressed with an undefinable though sure foreboding of evil, which always re turns, however they may try to shake it off; and so offensa resultat imago, the echo of their song comes back upon them. Every topic of triumph, by alluding to Trojan misfortunes, suggests the dangers of the Greeks. Nemesis, who waits on overmuch fortune, and overweening recklessness of right, bears heavily on those who have sacked a heaven-built city, and destroyed a sacred kingdom. There is blood crying to heaven. There is the muttered curse of those that dare not cry aloud. And there is a sure avenger for them that have no helper! And so they see but little difference between the misery of victor and vanquished, master and captive; and they pray to be delivered from both alike. These are intimations of evil to come, clear enough to him who hears or reads; naturally more clear to him than to the chorus themselves, who are possessed, rapt into futurity while they utter them; and who, when their dark hour passes, are too much mixed up with the events to rise to the pitch of their own inspiration, or judge of the fulness of their prophecy. But it must be borne in mind that, even to the hearer or reader, the warning does not stand so startlingly as we have represented it. It is all there, but invested in mystery by the art of the poet, which has been taxed to clothe the skeleton which is given above, in a wondrous form of beauty and glory. At this conjuncture the herald enters with a thanksgiving for his safe return. He tells of the army's sufferings and triumph; but this is not all. His most important announcement is, that the end has begun. The storm which has been hanging over the Greeks has burst; and the shipwreck of the returning warriors is the earnest of all that the chorus has foretold. In this tempest they lose sight of Menelaus. Probably, indeed, thus much is historical; but it is not introduced here merely as an historical fact. As he does not appear again in the trilogy, some scholars conjecture that this allusion was meant to connect the trilogy with the fourth drama, the Proteus. But this is not necessary to explain it. It is, as has been before hint ed, a sufficient reason for his disappearance, that he was one of the two sons of Atreus (or Pleisthenes), on whom vengeance has been accumulating; and that by his being spirited away and lost sight of, the full weight of destiny is concentrated on the one head of the devoted Agamemnon. The return of the herald follows the signal of the beacons, and is again followed by the appearance of Agamemnon, with little more than two choral odes interven ing. Here is a problem for the sticklers for the unity of time. Afterwards, in the Eumenides, the scene shifts from Delphi to Athens, if not also from one part of Athens to another. So that the unities of time and place may equally be dispensed with. The technical canons of which one has heard so much from the French school of expositors of Hellenic art, are not binding upon Eschylus. Indeed, these socalled Greek, or rather Gallo-Grecian, unities are but a modern forgery, foisting upon Aristotle a doctrine of which he never dreamt, and for oneness of conception, for the living whole of creative poetry, substituting a dead, mechanical union of parts filling up an arbitrary outline :-one indeed, but one as a volume, not as a work is one. Like other falsehoods, they are built upon a truth; and that is, that unity is excellence, and consistency indispensable. Hence, the more perfectly a tragedy combined all in detail, the more in that point it would approach perfection. Of this excellence no one was a more consummate master than Eschylus. The whole Trilogy is a proof of this: for it is one in a sense in which no other dramatic poem extant can be called so. But, in the detail, all minutiæ must be duly subordinated to the grand whole; and one essential point in the definition was, that the subject-matter must be of weight and importance (πρᾶξις μέγεθος ixovca), involving therefore various interests, events, and characters, and often spreading over a considerable time, in proportion to that greatness which gives it its fitness for tragic handling. The niceties, therefore, which go by the name of the unities of time and place, will frequently interfere with the development of the plot, in exact proportion to its tragic grandeur :—that is, when the plot is a good plot,' artfully devised and complicated, there will be far more difficulty in accommodating everything to these niceties than where there is little plot or none at all. When such difficulties occur, the minor consideration should give way. In scenes of a purely domestic character, it would be comparatively easy to adhere strictly to place and punctually to time; and hence in the later comedy we usually find this done; because here the intricacies of the plot extend no further than the concerns of two neighbouring families. But it is otherwise in such dramas as we are treating of. 6 And here let not the real questions be mistaken: for mistaken it will be, if we are to inquire whether Eschylus leaves time enough to let the spectator or reader think that Agamemnon may have returned. This is an absurdity. We know that we are (as the case may be) witnessing or reading a play, with full purpose to give ourselves up to the illusion, if it be not rudely dispelled by some awkwardness in the artist: -we dream until we are forcibly awakened. The real question then is, whether the want of unity is such as to dispel the illusion, and to bring us back to the work-day world and the measurement of time. If we measure the choral odes, as Sterne's critic did the soliloquy, by the stop-watch, the Agamemnon cannot stand such a test as this. But, under such circumstances, what is there that can stand, which will be worth standing room? Let all the sticklers for the unities lay their heads together, and whence will they exhume, or when will they manufacture, a play in which the manager's or poet's clock will keep time with the clocks at the outside of the theatre, or with the watches of the audience? There never was a play in which some scenes did not require an indefinite interval to elapse between them. Let this be of minutes, or hours, or days, the stop-watch critic is answered; and with reasonable beings the matter is sooner or later brought to this issue. If the poet does not carry the spectator with him so completely as to make him lose count of time, he has failed; and no observation of the unities can make up for his failure. In the matters of real life, while we stand on the earth and are acted upon by its influence, what matters it to us, practically speaking, that we are spinning along at the rate of millions of miles in a minute? Do we stand the less steadily Does our full belief in the physical truth interfere with the impressions which we receive from our senses? And so it is that, if we are rapt into the sphere of the poet, and whirled along with him whither his orbit leads us, we can no more measure or take account of such minute points as these, than we can measure how far we have travelled through space since we sat down to our intellectual treat. We are entitled to demand that the poet shall do thus much for us: and it is sufficiently done, if there is any such interruption occupying the theatre for a time, as will serve to dissolve the continuity of the action. If, during such a pause, a new train of thought be successfully interpolated, then the laws of mind make the interval for all practical purposes an indefinite one. Hence it follows that the objection touching the chorus, as having only so many lines to sing, while Agamemnon has so many leagues to sail, is a mere quibble. Modern playwrights find no difficulty in the mat tera curtain drops, or a scene changes. This at once breaks the sequence of our ideas, and, with or without the aid of the orchestra, we are wafted over minutes or years, as the case may be. The chorus' or 'grex' coming in to apologize, like a showman interpreting his puppets, as we frequently find it in the Elizabethan dramatists, betrays a rude state of the art. It is true that the mystery of the sceneshifter was not so much studied by the ancients as by the moderns; but there was the entire change of performance to serve the same purpose. The chorus, with its solemn evolutions-the lyre-the song-the dance carried the spectators at once into a new world; and if they had any feeling for what was going on, and could discharge from their minds the dialogue of the past scene, so far as to enter into that which was before them, they had at once lost count of time, sufficiently to surrender themselves to the poet, and to justify his experience by its success. It cannot be denied that this is a hazardous enterprise; so hazardous, indeed, that whole crowds of most respectable playwriters will best consult their reputation by not trying it. But it is not the less true that one who dares not run this hazard will scarcely make good his title to the name of poet; and in cases like that one which has led us to the present digression, where the irregularity in a point of detail is directly subservient to the grouping and unity of the whole, there is nothing to defend or apologise for; but rather everything to praise, as the direct means towards an allimportant excellence. But this reminds us that our digression is, in its way, a serious violation of the unities; and also that time and paper and the reader's patience will all fail us, if we go on as we have begun, doing the choral songs into prose. Nor is it necessary for our purpose; since enough has been said to show the idea of the chorus, which is carried on still further in the following strains: until at last, when Agamemnon has returned, and all adverse destiny seems overruled, the chorus complain wonderingly, that some mysterious influence makes their highest notes of triumph die away into a funereal strain; and pray, yet dare not hope, that their souls' prophecy may prove false. All now is wound up to the pitch where some catastrophe is expected; and, ere it comes, we have shadowed forth in dim oracular grandeur by the swan-song of Cassandra,-who is the very impersonation of Destiny-which must give warning, or it would not be known as such; yet must |