his wheel is always coming round and round. | in this world; though this is not called for On these grounds our tragedy may be pro- where a religion of better promises comes nounced defective. And not tragedy alone, in to support the soul. How bitterly this but any fictitious composition which only excites the feelings, whether in the way of ministering as a stimulant to listlessness, furnishing a languid mind with fantastic shows and indolent emotions,' or by thoroughly rousing and stirring up the soul through the passions,-if it then ceases from its work, and neither teaches a moral lesson nor leads to a practical result.

The greatest tragic poet of recent times, in his Essay on Tragic Art,' has a passage which, in great part, serves singularly to confirm our views; though it leads him (strangely, as we must think) to a conclusion very different from that which we have presumed to draw :-

Whatever convenience there may be in having destiny to solve our perplexities, the notion of a blind subjection to it is degrading to man; and this leaves something to be wished for, even in the finest specimens of the Greek stage; for by this final appeal to destiny, while our reason demands reason, they in effect leave the perplexities absolutely unsolved. But at the highest point of the development of our moral nature this, too, is reconciled, and there is nothing any longer left to jar. Here even our quarrel with destiny is at an end, vanishing in a feeling, or rather a full consciousness, how all things are working together, providentially and propitiously, to one end. We then not only feel at one within ourselves, but are sensible of the exquisite adaptation of all the parts in one great whole; and the seeming irregularity which hurts us in the isolated case only serves as a spur to make us look, for the vindication of the particular fact, into the general law, which will turn the seeming discord into perfect harmony. To this height Greek art never raised itself, from the deficiency of their natural religion and philosophy."*

If this be taken simply as based on an induction of most single plays (such as the King Edipus before named), it is both true and very important: and with that limitation we must assent to the position that in this respect the religion and philosophy of Greece were a fetter to the poet. Speaking as heathens, it must be confessed that the calamities of Edipus, and the utter want of connection between them and the parts of his character which stand in need of discipline, are not to be reconciled with a right order of things. For surely in heathen poetry there is an absolute necessity for poetical justice and a visible adjustment of the balance of good and evil, by the restoration of virtue and right to their privileges

Schiller, Ueber die tragische Kunst, Werke, vol. xxii. p. 333, seq.; 1828.

void was felt may be seen in the dreary pictures which Homer, and after him the other Greek poets, give us of all that attends the decline of life! Not to refer only to the chilling words of Achilles in the nether world,

Μὴ δή μοι θάνατόν γε παραΰδα, φαίδιμ' Οδυσσεῦ βουλοίμην κ' ἐπάρουρος τῶν θητεύεμεν ἄλλῳ ἀνδρὶ παρ' ἀκλήρῳ, ᾧ μὴ βίοτος πολὺς εἴη, ἢ πᾶσιν νεκύεσσι καταφθέμενοισι ἀνάσσειν, there is precisely the same spirit in the living picture of Laertes in the Odyssey, and in that which Achilles draws of his father Peleus in the Iliad. As soon as their way of life has fallen into the sere, they are, as a matter of course, set aside; and the remainder of their existence is a ghastly spectral life in death, haunting the scenes of their old pride and prowess. This is man, hanging on to earth, clinging the more closely to it as he feels it slipping from his grasp, because he knows or will know nothing beyond, which can fill its hollowness. Afterwards philosophy tried to do better things: but a miserable comforter the nature of heathen consolations, than supwas she; and rather exposed, by analysing, plied the aching void in the weary heart.— No; Virtue's triumph and Vice's punishment must in heathen poetry be visible, or we lose that moral lesson, which to the Christian is more perfect when kept clear of all the transitory rewards and punishments of this life. Bearing on this point there are some admirable remarks of Scott (Preface to Ivanhoe) in answer to those who would have wished him to reward the lofty character of Rebecca with worldly prosperity:

'A character of a highly virtuous and lofty stamp is degraded rather than exalted by an attempt to reward virtue with temporal prosperity. Such is not the recompense which Providence has deemed worthy of suffering merit; and it is a dangerous and fatal doctrine to teach young persons, that rectitude of conduct and of principle are either naturally allied with or adequately rewarded by the gratification of our passions or attainment of our wishes. In a word, if a virtuous and self-denied character is dismissed with temporal wealth, greatness, &c., the reader will be apt to say, Virtue has had its reward.'

Will it then be said that this very truth, that virtue has not always its reward nor vice its punishment in this world, does away with our objection to the want of a moral lesson in the catastrophe of a modern, i. e. a Christian tragedy? We apprehend that it cannot be justly said, for two reasons. The

deficiency has not been the result of any alteration made to suit our different position as Christians, but has been received as handed down by the tradition of our heathen forerunners, with whom it could have no such significance. But a more important ground is, that modern tragedies are no more Christian than ancient ones. The religious view is never brought out :-the religious, at least Christian, virtues are not heroic:-Christian sufferings are not tragic: -the Christian character is not adorned by such bravery as the world loves, such magnanimity as the world can appreciate, or such human passion as creates a deep interest with the world. The Christian hero humbles himself, is as nothing in his own eyes, prefers all to himself. His sufferings do not raise him in human eyes. A spectacle' indeed he may be to men and angels; but how different a spectacle! Angels minister to him: but before men he fights with beasts. His greatness is such as men cannot see-could not comprehend or believe if they did see it.

Thus, in the light in which we stand, it is much to be feared that tragedy has a tendency to heathenise our minds; whereas to heathens the antique poet, when he knew his vocation, was the messenger and authoritative teacher of morality and religion, and from him the nations were fain to glean scattered fragments of the truth.

But if we place Schiller's objection side by side with the definition of Aristotle, it vanishes it is an objection only to a description of tragedy which does not come up to the definition. We have yet to seek, and this is our next object, whether there be not something in which the idea of the ancient philosopher will be fully embodied so as to annihilate the modern poet's objection to the Greek drama. As to his assertion of the superiority of modern tragedy, we may content ourselves with protesting against it in passing. The present inquiry shall be strictly limited to the consideration of Greek tragedy, as in the highest sense a work of art, working on the most definite principles; and we are not without hopes of imparting to the reader something of our own conviction that Æschylus stands unrivalled as a consummate artist.

This must be done, however, not by con

sidering single plays, which may have been, and which in many cases we know to have been only parts of a whole, but by examining the groups into which the poet formed them; for it is with the Greek drama as with the Greek sculpture, in which every torso or separate limb of a single figure bears indeed the impress of the master mind; but that mind is not rightly appre- |

ciated until we study the full group of the tympanum :-nay, until the temple too be taken into consideration, and the framework of earth and sky in which it stands.

It is now necessary to go back to the period at which the Satyric Drama was established, and the ludicrous element thus removed from tragedy. It is recorded that at this time the competitors were bound to exhibit a tetralogy, consisting of three tragedies (a trilogy), and a satyric drama. All the details of this arrangement are quite unknown, so that it is a fair subject for speculation; and as a speculation the remark may be hazarded, that this proportion of three to one is a strange and startling one for the inposdióvvea to bear to the worship of Bacchus in the compact or composition made between the poetry of the drama and the religio temporis. It seems, à priori, much more probable that the tragic portion was originally looked upon as one whole, and the satyric portion as another. This view would suggest the theory of one tragedy in three acts or parts, rather than of three tragedies; and as it is not difficult to trace a progressive system of encroachment on the worship of the god by the chartered libertines of poetry, this account of the first step would help to make their gradual success more intelligible, and to explain how it happens that so little is heard of the revolution until it is found to be quietly, but fully accomplished; when the satyric drama is so far from being any longer sole possessor of the field, that it does not even share it with one corrival, but is driven up as it were into a corner, struggling hard to keep one quarter of its ancient kingdom;— nay, even rudely jostled at times from this its last stronghold; as is known to have been the case in the tetralogy to which The Alcestis of Euripides belonged.*

To come to the plays extant,--of Æschy

* It had often been remarked that the Alcestis was scarcely to be called a tragedy; and especially that Hercules sustains exactly that character in it which made him so popular in the satyric dramas; we are now enabled to say positively (from a fragment tetralogy, and consequently did duty for a satyric of the Didascalia) that this play stood fourth in a play: Ο δεύτερος Ευριπίδης Κρήσσαις, Αλκμαιῶνι τῷ διὰ Ψωφιδος, Τηλέφῳ, Αλκηστίδι· τὸ δὲ δράμα κωμικωτέραν ἔχει κατασκευήν. The other tetralogies positively known are,

(prschylus) Phineus, Perse, Glaucus Potnieus, (Prometheus IIvpracts).

(Eschylus) Agamemnon, Choephora, Eumenides, (Proteus) The Orestea.

(Eschylus) Edoni, Bassarides, Neaviekot, (Lycurgus) The Lycurgia.

ta).

(Euripides) Medea, Philoctetes, Dictys, (Theris(Euripides) Alexander, Palamedes, Troades, (Sisyphus).

(Xenocles) Edipus, Lycaon, Bacchæ, (Athamas). (Philocles) The Pandionis.

lus there is none of which it has not been | come down to us; since this, as formerly conjectured that it formed part of a trilogy stated, was produced almost at the close of on some connected subject; but how closely connected and artificially worked up we cannot tell, and dare not guess; for we must confess that our mind is always thrown into an attitude of suspicion by the extreme plausibility with which Welcker plays at thimble-rig with these luckless trilogies. In every book that he publishes (and he writes unceasingly) they alter their form: the plays are never at rest, but are now here, now there, back and forwards, in and out of their respective groups; like the single eye of the mythical Trilogy of the Phorcides, which was transferred from one to another as it was wanted for the day; or that more anciently recorded trilogy still, which was

Πρόσθε λέων, ὅπιθεν δὲ δράκων, μέσση δὲ χίμαιρα.
But one trilogy has come down to us en-
tire; and this, therefore, is safe ground
upon
which to try conclusions.

Of Sophocles there remain no trilogies: indeed the grammarians record that he was author of the innovation of exhibiting single plays. This, however, can scarcely mean (as it was understood formerly) that he brought forward only one drama at one time. For we have the distinct record of his satyric plays, as well as of the trilogies and tetralogies with which his contemporaries and juniors contended against him for the prize. Now it is contrary to reason to suppose that he could have been allowed to contend with one play, against those who exhibited four; Welcker's explanation must therefore here be adopted, and single plays be understood simply to mean unconnected. Sophocles then was the author of the next step in the revolution, wherein there was no longer one story handled tragically and another embodied in a satyric play, but the three parts of the trilogy became wholly disunited, except by the external accident of their juxtaposition. This was not done, it must be inferred, by others until Sophocles had set the example; but doubtless it may be taken for granted, on the one hand, that Sophocles had written upon the old model-that is, in connected trilogies-before he arrived at sufficient eminence to make such an innovation; and, on the other, that Eschylus, before the end of his career, may have availed himself of this new licence, as he adopted other alterations which are ascribed to Sophocles. But we may rejoice that he did not entirely abandon the original law;-as we should have then been with out the specimen of the trilogy which has

VOL. LXX,

24

the poet's life. Another tetralogy of Æschylus is mentioned under one collective name, and consequently, as may be surmised, consisting of a connected plot ;and of this it may further be remarked that the satyric drama is also in union with the three tragedies. This is the Lycurgia; and the subject of it being taken from the Bacchic mythology, makes the introduction of the satyrs easy and natural. In the case of the Orestea there seems to have been no such quadruple alliance, in spite of Schoell's theory, which we formerly propounded with such gravity as we were capable of. It is true that the Orestea is sometimes called a tetralogy; but this would not unnaturally happen even if the afterpiece was dies: and the scholiast on the Ranæ of Arisnot on the same subject with the three tragetophanes, who gives it this name, tells us at the same time that Aristarchus called it a trilogy, which the critic could not have done if the plot had extended through all the four. To illustrate this by a modern analogy;-one series of the Tales of my Landlord' contained Old Mortality' in three volumes and the Black Dwarf' in one. This being so, though there is no connection between the stories, there would be nothing surprising in hearing the whole. tetralogy (so to speak) called loosely 'Old Mortality;' whereas, if the fourth volume. had been a continuation of the three first, no one could have called these a trilogy.

The scholiast on the Birds of Aristophanes mentions a group of tragedies on the story of Pandion, a Pandionid, by Philacles; and among the tragedies of Euripides we find that the Alexander, Palamedes, and Troades were exhibited together in which, if we may judge from the names, the plot was continuous. Here the satyric drama was the Sisyphus.

For the other trilogies-indeed for all the other plays which we find named-it is an easy task to divine some theme of a common plan of interest; because the few poor fragments that remain can scarcely contradict one; or, if they do, they can be lopped and cropped-a new name put upon one,--a leg cut off another,—a Taliacotian nose grafted upon a third,-until all are made to correspond in some measure to one's notions of the names intended for them; and if a first experiment is unsuccessful, it is but to shift the labels and begin again. "Tis as easy as writing nonsense verses. But when we find that, after all this labour, the unity claimed for most of them is but a oneness of moral, thrice

Tyrants kill

Whom they will:

illustrated by three unconnected stories, the horrible revenge of Atreus. But the what inducement is there for us to go fur-revenge was incomplete: according to the ther? Such performances are not trilo-eastern proverb— gies; they are acted charades; and if Athenian cleverness could have discovered that the Phineus, Perse, and Glaucus had no meaning but Greece triumphant over Barbary.'-they would have hooted the conundrum off the stage. How different from this is the unity in which the Orestea came, as one perfect whole, from the head of the poet !

To this we now return; and in tracing it we must start with a view of that destiny, which was doubly working for evil in public and in private-on the family of the Pelopida. The drama opens upon us at the point where these two independent, but equally hostile influences converge.

faithful

But never tyrant killed his heir.'

the chain of horrors, one thread in the end

And the youngest, an infant child, is rescued, to grow up the born enemy, the Goel, or (may it not be said?) the personified Erinnys of the house of Atreus. It is in this capacity that he appears; and-notwithstanding the allusions of the chorus to the enseamed bed,' and Cassandra's revelations of the wolf stealing into the lion's lair-gisthus, with all his vileness, is yet but one of the instruments through which evil is punished by evil. His adultery is In their public character the princes of kept comparatively in the background. We 'Pelops' line' were exalted above all their hear nothing of the story of the guardian contemporaries: and all made them but minstrel; how his holy strains preserved the more obnoxious to that jealousy of Clytemnestra from evil; and how the heaven—φθονερὸν γὰρ τὸ θεῖον—which always man was borne to a lonely island, attended on more than mortal fortune, ready and her fall soon followed. Their adulto avenge the more heavily the slightest tery is not the one grand crime bringing false step of those who were so highly all others in its train; it is only one link in favoured. The taking of Troy, which was the climax of their glory, was also the crisis of their fate; for Troy too was divine;' Troy was a fated city, both in its glories and its sins; and the reckoning which it paid was proportionally fearful. But the reckoning was paid, and the victors now stood within the same danger. Raised on the ruins of the heaven-built city, her scourge could hardly fail to fall on them: all that had affronted heaven in Troy now redounded on their heads: and, besides, there was a long account of actual wickedness to settle, for violence and bloodshed in the siege, horrors and godlessness in the sack of the town. Nor was there wanting a cry to heaven against the sons of Atreus, from their own home, among their own people. All Greece had suffered the ills of the expedition, which had served only to avenge the quarrel of the one, and to enhance the renown of the other. Abroad, the flower of Greece was wede away;' and at home, in the absence of their lawful monarchs, the people were ground down by anarchy or tyranny.

less inextricable web (tipo optiẞnspor) which involves, not Agamemnon only, but them all. It is the hereditary curse which is working itself out in each generation through the evil passions of man's heart, and visiting alternately each branch of the family by the agency of the other.

And if this be so with Ægisthus, still more emphatically is it so with Clytemnestra. Probably very few, even of those who have read the Agamemnon most carefully, are conscious of the art with which this, the more degrading portion of her wickedness, is kept out of sight; because all come to the study of Eschylus with the details of the mythology in their minds: they are admitted into the mansion of the Pelopidæ up the back-stairs by Dr. Lempriere (the scandalous chronicler of the ancients), instead of coming with the triumphal procession of Agamemnon to the palace-gates. But let us recommend to our readers to glance over the play, with the special view of remarking the extreme delicacy with which this is shaded. One or two figurative hints of the chorus, one or two oracular metaphors of Cassandra, are all that prepare us for the bold and unembarrassed language of Clytemnestra herself, after the deed of death is done, and the load of disIt is traced to the slaughter of Myr-simulation off her mind: by which time the tilus in one generation in another it bursts special sin of her connexion with Ægisthus forth in the quarrel of Atreus and Thyestes, is, as it were, merged in the unity of her the incest of Thyestes with Aëropé, and

a

And there were other horrors, more private, yet not less fearful. The line of Pelops was, from their very origin, under curse, mysteriously bound up, as by a principle of compensation, with all their

ness.

great

* Od. iii., 267, seq.