The Common Reader
audience of seventeen thousand people, perhaps, with ears and eyes eager
and attentive, with bodies whose muscles would grow stiff if they sat
too long without diversion. Music and dancing he would need, and
naturally would choose one of those legends, like our Tristram and
Iseult, which are known to every one in outline, so that a great fund of
emotion is ready prepared, but can be stressed in a new place by each
new poet.
Sophocles would take the old story of Electra, for instance, but would
at once impose his stamp upon it. Of that, in spite of our weakness and
distortion, what remains visible to us? That his genius was of the
extreme kind in the first place; that he chose a design which, if it
failed, would show its failure in gashes and ruin, not in the gentle
blurring of some insignificant detail; which, if it succeeded, would cut
each stroke to the bone, would stamp each finger-print in marble. His
Electra stands before us like a figure so tightly bound that she can
only move an inch this way, an inch that. But each movement must tell to
the utmost, or, bound as she is, denied the relief of all hints,
repetitions, suggestions, she will be nothing but a dummy, tightly
bound. Her words in crisis are, as a matter of fact, bare; mere cries of
despair, joy, hate
οἲ ‘γὼ τάλαιν’, ὄλωλα τῇδ’ ὲν ἡμέρᾀ.
παῖσον, εἰ σθένεις, διπλῆν.
But these cries give angle and outline to the play. It is thus, with a
thousand differences of degree, that in English literature Jane Austen
shapes a novel. There comes a moment—“I will dance with you,” says
Emma—which rises higher than the rest, which, though not eloquent in
itself, or violent, or made striking by beauty of language, has the
whole weight of the book behind it. In Jane Austen, too, we have the
same sense, though the ligatures are much less tight, that her figures
are bound, and restricted to a few definite movements. She, too, in her
modest, everyday prose, chose the dangerous art where one slip means
death.
But it is not so easy to decide what it is that gives these cries of
Electra in her anguish their power to cut and wound and excite. It is
partly that we know her, that we have picked up from little turns and
twists of the dialogue hints of her character, of her appearance, which,
characteristically, she neglected; of something suffering in her,
outraged and stimulated to its utmost stretch of capacity, yet, as she
herself knows (“my behaviour is unseemly and becomes me ill”), blunted
and debased by the horror of her position, an unwed girl made to witness
her mother’s vileness and denounce it in loud, almost vulgar,
clamour to the world at large. It is partly, too, that we know in
the same way that Clytemnestra is no unmitigated villainess.
“δεινὸν τὸ τίκτειν ἐστίν,” she says—“there is a strange power in
motherhood”. It is no murderess, violent and unredeemed, whom Orestes
kills within the house, and Electra bids him utterly destroy—“strike
again”. No; the men and women standing out in the sunlight before the
audience on the hillside were alive enough, subtle enough, not mere
figures, or plaster casts of human beings.
Yet it is not because we can analyse them into feelings that they
impress us. In six pages of Proust we can find more complicated and
varied emotions than in the whole of the _Electra_. But in the _Electra_
or in the _Antigone_ we are impressed by something different, by
something perhaps more impressive—by heroism itself, by fidelity
itself. In spite of the labour and the difficulty it is this that draws
us back and back to the Greeks; the stable, the permanent, the original
human being is to be found there. Violent emotions are needed to rouse
him into action, but when thus stirred by death, by betrayal, by some
other primitive calamity, Antigone and Ajax and Electra behave in the
way in which we should behave thus struck down; the way in which
everybody has always behaved; and thus we understand them more easily
and more directly than we understand the characters in the _Canterbury
Tales_. These are the originals, Chaucer’s the varieties of the human
species.
It is true, of course, that these types of the original man or woman,
these heroic Kings, these faithful daughters, these tragic Queens who
stalk through the ages always planting their feet in the same places,
twitching their robes with the same gestures, from habit not from
impulse, are among the greatest bores and the most demoralising
companions in the world. The plays of Addison, Voltaire, and a host of
others are there to prove it. But encounter them in Greek. Even in
Sophocles, whose reputation for restraint and mastery has filtered down
to us from the scholars, they are decided, ruthless, direct. A fragment
of their speech broken off would, we feel, colour oceans and oceans of
the respectable drama. Here we meet them before their emotions have been
worn into uniformity. Here we listen to the nightingale whose song
echoes through English literature singing in her own Greek tongue. For
the first time Orpheus with his lute makes men and beasts follow him.
Their voices ring out clear and sharp; we see the hairy tawny bodies at
play in the sunlight among the olive trees, not posed gracefully on
granite plinths in the pale corridors of the British Museum. And then
suddenly, in the midst of all this sharpness and compression, Electra,
as if she swept her veil over her face and forbade us to think of her
any more, speaks of that very nightingale: “that bird distraught with
grief, the messenger of Zeus. Ah, queen of sorrow, Niobe, thee I deem
divine—thee; who evermore weepest in thy rocky tomb”.
And as she silences her own complaint, she perplexes us again with the
insoluble question of poetry and its nature, and why, as she speaks
thus, her words put on the assurance of immortality. For they are Greek;
we cannot tell how they sounded; they ignore the obvious sources of
excitement; they owe nothing of their effect to any extravagance of
expression, and certainly they throw no light upon the speaker’s
character or the writer’s. But they remain, something that has been
stated and must eternally endure.
Yet in a play how dangerous this poetry, this lapse from the particular
to the general must of necessity be, with the actors standing there in
person, with their bodies and their faces passively waiting to be made
use of! For this reason the later plays of Shakespeare, where there is
more of poetry than of action, are better read than seen, better
understood by leaving out the actual body than by having the body, with
all its associations and movements, visible to the eye. The intolerable
restrictions of the drama could be loosened, however, if a means could
be found by which what was general and poetic, comment, not action,
could be freed without interrupting the movement of the whole. It is
this that the choruses supply; the old men or women who take no active
part in the drama, the undifferentiated voices who sing like birds in
the pauses of the wind; who can comment, or sum up, or allow the poet to
speak himself or supply, by contrast, another side to his conception.
Always in imaginative literature, where characters speak for themselves
and the author has no part, the need of that voice is making itself
felt. For though Shakespeare (unless we consider that his fools and
madmen supply the part) dispensed with the chorus, novelists are always
devising some substitute—Thackeray speaking in his own person, Fielding
coming out and addressing the world before his curtain rises. So to
grasp the meaning of the play the chorus is of the utmost importance.
One must be able to pass easily into those ecstasies, those wild and
apparently irrelevant utterances, those sometimes obvious and
commonplace statements, to decide their relevance or irrelevance, and
give them their relation to the play as a whole.
We must “be able to pass easily”; but that of course is exactly what we
cannot do. For the most part the choruses, with all their obscurities,
must be spelt out and their symmetry mauled. But we can guess that
Sophocles used them not to express something outside the action of the
play, but to sing the praises of some virtue, or the beauties of some
place mentioned in it. He selects what he wishes to emphasise and sings
of white Colonus and its nightingale, or of love unconquered in fight.
Lovely, lofty, and serene his choruses grow naturally out of his
situations, and change, not the point of view, but the mood. In
Euripides, however, the situations are not contained within themselves;
they give off an atmosphere of doubt, of suggestion, of questioning; but
if we look to the choruses to make this plain we are often baffled
rather than instructed. At once in the _Bacchæ_ we are in the world of
psychology and doubt; the world where the mind twists facts and changes
them and makes the familiar aspects of life appear new and questionable.
What is Bacchus, and who are the Gods, and what is man’s duty to them,
and what the rights of his subtle brain? To these questions the chorus
makes no reply, or replies mockingly, or speaks darkly as if the
straitness of the dramatic form had tempted Euripides to violate it in
order to relieve his mind of its weight. Time is so short and I have so
much to say, that unless you will allow me to place together two
apparently unrelated statements and trust to you to pull them together,
you must be content with a mere skeleton of the play I might have given
you. Such is the argument. Euripides therefore suffers less than
Sophocles and less than Æschylus from being read privately in a room,
and not seen on a hillside in the sunshine. He can be acted in the mind;
he can comment upon the questions of the moment; more than the others he
will vary in popularity from age to age.
If then in Sophocles the play is concentrated in the figures themselves,
and in Euripides is to be retrieved from flashes of poetry and questions
far flung and unanswered, Æschylus makes these little dramas (the
_Agamemnon_ has 1663 lines; _Lear_ about 2600), tremendous by stretching
every phrase to the utmost, by sending them floating forth in metaphors,
by bidding them rise up and stalk eyeless and majestic through the
scene. To understand him it is not so necessary to understand Greek as
to understand poetry. It is necessary to take that dangerous leap
through the air without the support of words which Shakespeare also asks
of us. For words, when opposed to such a blast of meaning, must give
out, must be blown astray, and only by collecting in companies convey
the meaning which each one separately is too weak to express. Connecting
them in a rapid flight of the mind we know instantly and instinctively
what they mean, but could not decant that meaning afresh into any other
words. There is an ambiguity which is the mark of the highest poetry; we
cannot know exactly what it means. Take this from the Agamemnon for
instance—
ὀμμάτων δ ἐν ἀχηνίαις ἔρρει πᾶσ’ Ἀφροδίτα.
The meaning is just on the far side of language. It is the meaning which
in moments of astonishing excitement and stress we perceive in our minds
without words; it is the meaning that Dostoevsky (hampered as he was by
prose and as we are by translation) leads us to by some astonishing run
up the scale of emotions and points at but cannot indicate; the meaning
that Shakespeare succeeds in snaring.
Æschylus thus will not give, as Sophocles gives, the very words that
people might have spoken, only so arranged that they have in some
mysterious way a general force, a symbolic power, nor like Euripides
will he combine incongruities and thus enlarge his little space, as a
small room is enlarged by mirrors in odd corners. By the bold and running