CHAPTER VII.
HEROES, HERALDS, SLAVES.
76. The heroes of Euripides are by no means so prominent or so interesting as his heroines. While he has succeeded, among the latter, in creating immortal types, there is hardly a single hero in his extant plays of whom so much could be asserted. In Ion and in Hippolytus we have indeed charming pictures of youthful freshness and innocence, not without a certain preoccupation which seems like callousness, and shows a want of sympathy with the passions of manhood. And these have lived through in Racine's Joas, and the "Garçon insensible" of other French dramas. The fate of Hippolytus is indeed deeply tragic. Though he feels he has been tricked into an oath, and that in his heart he is unsworn, yet so honourably does he adhere to the once exacted obligation, that he abandons his country and home, and submits to the roost' dreadful imputations, rather than break his faith. Yet withal he is not a really great hero. For the vengeance of Aphrodite, which works his ruin, can hardly be called the natural result or his character and circumstances, and is rather the external interference of a mischievous Providence, which uses him as a toy or plaything. So also Achilles in the Aulid Iphigenia—a perfect gentleman, courteous, chivalrous, and sympathetic—does not play the chief or even a tragic part in the action. Such again is Pylades, always a secondary character, the affectionate friend of Orestes, the devoted supporter of his house, ever ready to help and to encourage, but in no sense a figure of real importance in the Euripidean drama, though the mutual affection of the friends has made their relation more interesting and suggestive than the characters themselves. There are also national types, such as the kings of Athens—Theseus and Demophon—who are intended to personify all the virtues of the Athenians, and to play the anachronous part of constitutional kings in the heroic age. So also Menelaus is often the embodiment of the Spartan foes, who were devastating the fields and decimating the youth of Athens all through the poet's later life. But it is the treachery and selfishness, not the military prowess of the Spartans, that Euripides paints for his audience.
77. He is, indeed, rich in feeble querulous heroes, apart from the ragged heroes of suffering, whom Aristophanes derides. The Agamemnon of his Iphigenia is a palmary instance. All through the play he is drifting hither and thither, inventing paltry subterfuges, playing the king without policy or firmness, an object of contempt and of pity to his stronger subjects. All this is exceedingly dramatic, but only suited to a secondary character. Very similar is the drawing of Admetus, the hospitable but selfish and weak husband of Alcestis. We feel the protestations that he would join her in death are not in real earnest, or if so they are but momentary resolves, and his lamentations are rather for his own loss than for the sorrows of his noble wife. I have already pointed out (p. 94), how exceedingly dramatic are these very defects in the bereaved husband.
78. We find in the Eteocles of the Phœnissæ a nearer approach to a tragic hero. The conception was due to Æschylus, so that Euripides cannot be credited with originality either in the character or the situation. But the warlike energy of the man, and the boldness with which he derides the idea of surrendering his once acquired power to his brother, even though justice was against him—this was a life portrait of the Greek despot. Nevertheless his strong patriotism and his valour enlist our sympathy for him against his feebler and more inconsistent brother. I have already noted above (p. 80), how in smaller touches Euripides has contrasted the brothers. Polynices, the gentler and weaker of the two, plays the part of the ruthless invader of his native land; the stern Eteocles is its patriotic defender, nevertheless our sympathies are with the exile, though he attempt what the Greeks would call parricide against his country.
79. Far more dramatic, but not more interesting, is the Pentheus of the Bacchæ, who may be compared in some respects with Sophocles' Œdipus, inasmuch as his headstrong obstinacy urges him into a hopeless snare. But Œdipus is stricken with a family curse, from which nothing could relieve him; he is personally respectable and interesting, whereas Pentheus is painted as a hot-headed and self-sufficient youth, who in spite of advice and warning determines to crush the new Bacchic cult, and perishes tragically in the attempt. He is therefore altogether a hero of circumstance and not of character.
80. The same may be said of Orestes in two of the plays in which lie appears (the Orestes and Electra),[1] as the agent of Apollo to avenge his father's murder upon his mother, and suffers in consequence from the dreadful madness of remorse. This famous conception—the Greek Hamlet—was again due to Æschylus, and as we might expect, Euripides rehandled it rather in the direction of adding character than pathos to the hero.
It is very interesting, but would require a separate essay to compare the Greek conception of this situation with that of Shakspere. Of course the Greeks looked upon the father as much more important than the mother; and any hesitation in slaying the criminal Ægisthus would have been to them quite unnatural. But while Sophocles, at the close of his Electra suggests no difficulties of remorse even in the punishment of Clytemnestra, which Electra demands with repulsive eagerness (v. 1415), Euripides, with far truer feeling, not only makes Electra shudder, and abhor her own participation in the murder, when she perceives it accomplished (Electra, vv. 1181 sqq.), but—and this is perhaps the most remarkable anticipation of modern feeling in all his plays—he makes Orestes, in the intervals of his madness, challenge the holiness of Apollo's command, and add (Orestes, vv. 288 sqq.), "For I think that my father, had I asked him face to face whether I should slay my mother, would have urged me with many prayers by this very beard not to thrust my sword into the throat of her that bore me." Here we recognise a veritable scene in Hamlet. But in a Greek poet of Euripides' age, it is far more remarkable than after fifteen centuries of Christian preaching. This, and the remorse of Clytemnestra, to which I have already alluded, are indeed features in which Euripides has distinctly risen above the narrower standpoint of the purely Periclean poet. But we must return to the drawing of Orestes.
81. The anxious Electra sitting by him in his deep sleep, his waking again in wild anguish, his tenderness to his sister in his calmer moments, afford a splendid scene (Ortstes, vv. 140 sqq.) in an otherwise disagreeable and overwrought play. Far more characteristic and noble is the appearance of the same Orestes in the Tauric Iphigenia, where he is sent with his friend Pylades to the inhospitable Tauri, to carry off the image of Artemis, but where he is seized again by his madness, captured, and brought before his sister for sacrifice. Quite apart from the tragic situation, apart, too, from the pathetic interest in the recognition of brother and sister, there are many delicate touches of character, which make this Orestes the most striking of all Euripides' heroes. If indeed the end of the play had been tragic and not melodramatic, this would have been generally recognised. But the deceitful plan of stealing the image, of escaping from the land by combined fraud and violence, mars the conclusion and weakens our sympathy with the hero. In the earlier scenes he exhibits every element of a really noble nature. He at first refuses to tell his name, that he may die forgotten, for his troubles have made him weary of his life. Yet upon his sister's persistence he tells his country, and confesses the misfortunes of the royal house, all with stern simplicity, as being evils too signal to palliate, too crushing to lament. It is the proposal that he shall escape, and abandon Pylades, which brings him back to his only remaining hold on life—his affection for Pylades. His voluntary resigning of his life[2] to save a friend is a rate instance of this virtue in the heroes of Euripides, and this touching scene has not lost its hold upon the imagination of modern dramatists.
82. There remains but one more hero to be discussed, who appears in two plays, once as a hero of circumstance, once again as a hero of character—I mean the Heracles of the Raging Heracles and of the Alcestis. In the latter his portrait is very distinct and even somewhat comic. He eats and drinks to excess before the heartbroken servant, who is ordered by the hospitable Admetus to keep him in ignorance of the sorrows of the house. He even rallies this servant upon his doleful face, and bids him carouse with him and enjoy his life. But no sooner does he hear the real state of things, than he feels cut to the heart at his apparent want of feeling, and sets off at once, like a blunt honest creature of action, to set matters right by a desperate conflict. Even when he returns with the veiled Alcestis, his comic side comes out in the way he insists upon Admetus receiving her in spite of the strongest protestations. He is of course a secondary character in the play, but the contrast of his homely practical force with the luxurious effusiveness of Admetus is one of the happiest features in that remarkable play. His victory, moreover, is greatly enhanced by the powerlessness of Apollo, the friend of the house, to obtain more than an exchange of victims, and the grim dialogue of Apollo and Death, as they meet before the palace, is clearly intended to show the miraculous prowess of the mighty hero.
83. In the Raging Heracles he is not drawn with a very different character, but is made a pathetic victim of terrible circumstances, the more pathetic as he has spent all his life in labours of usefulness, and has just saved his wife and children from death at the hands of their persecutor. But no sooner has he appeared as their saviour, than a heaven-sent madness makes him their murderer, and his situation becomes more deeply tragic than that of Sophocles' Ajax. For the outburst of Ajax only brought him disgrace; Heracles is so crushed that there is no place for the display of iron resolve. He is discovered asleep, and fast bound, with his wretched father and the chorus watching him—a kindred scene to the watching of Electra over Orestes. When he wakes and gradually learns his misfortunes, he is about to commit instant suicide, when his old friend Theseus appears, and succeeds in calming his excitement. He then bursts out into a magnificent impeachment of the Providence which has dogged his steps from childhood, and marred all his splendid life. Now he is so polluted and accursed that the very earth will cry out against him, and further life is impossible. But Theseus urges that even the gods endure suffering and incur disgrace, and yet they live and inhabit Olympus. He appeals to Heracles to come with him to Athens, and spend the rest of his days in peace. To this the hero replies by denying scornfully all the legends of the disorders of the gods; but as it implies cowardice to fly from life—and the poet perhaps points at Sophocles' Ajax—he will acquiesce and depart with his friend. But be can hardly tear himself from the bodies of his faithful wife and beloved children, he insists on repeated directions for their funerals, and leaves the stage a subdued and broken-hearted, but not desperate, man. Thus the dignity of a great nature asserts itself against the utmost which a spiteful Providence can do to break it down, and the resigned departure of the hero for Athens is a greater victory over the enmity of Juno, than all the successes of his twelve Labours.
84. Here then we have a truly great and tragic figure, and one worthy of a permanent place in the temple of Fame. But, with these splendid exceptions, it must be confessed that Euripides has not drawn us the heroes we find in Æschylus and in Sophocles. Is it a fault of his genius, or is it the result of deliberate choice? Or, again, is it the accident of tradition, which has not handed us down his Telephus, his Palamedes, and other plays, in which he devoted himself to the portraiture of character? Probably all these causes have contributed to the result. It may be regarded as certain that time has robbed us of companion heroes to Orestes and Heracles; but it is not probable that we have lost a Euripidean Prometheus or Philoctetes equal to those of Æschylus or Sophocles. It may be that he considered the men of the older tragedy as too prominent, and unduly preferred to the equally heroic and devoted women; that he endeavoured to adjust the measure, and vindicate for the gentler sex its tragic position. But it seems also certain that he was so far the child of his age—the thorough Periclean, who worshipped intellect and cleverness, and despised or suspected simple virtues—that neither he nor his audience felt attracted by moral character in comparison to intellect, and that they preferred the excitement of a complicated plot or a pathetic situation, to a detailed portrait of unpractical constancy and impolitic honour.
85. Little need be said on his minor characters. Here, again, we seem to see that spirit of adjusting the balance, of "putting down the mighty from their seats and exalting the humble and meek." The gods, who appear in prologues and epilogues, are mere scene-shifters, called in to expedite the course of the play, and are kind, spiteful, or indifferent, as it suits the requirements of the moment. Many of the slaves, on the contrary, are noble and cultivated beyond the fashion of the older tragedy, and there are few finer touches than the outburst of joy in the old retainer of Menelaus, when he finds that the real Helen had not fled from her home or disgraced her royal name and race. So too the peasant, the pretended husband of Electra, who guards her as a sacred deposit from his royal master, is a remarkable character, whose nobility is specially lauded in one of the finest monologues of the play.
86. I will conclude with a word concerning Euripides' conception of old age in men and women. He often has characters of this description: the father of Heracles, the mother of Theseus, the father of Admetus, of Pentheus, and many others. In no case does he make an old man one of his chief heroes, and his Hecuba is merely a queen of suffering. For, as to the characteristics of old age, he insists perpetually either upon its weakness or its selfishness, never on its dignity, and seldom on the ripeness of its experience. In the Alcestis, the selfishness of Admetus' old parents in not volunteering to die for him is constantly and seriously insisted upon. In the Heracleidæ and in the Bacchæ the impotent excitement of old men is treated as ridiculous, and as introducing a comic element into tragic scenes. Here again the poet is a Periclean Athenian, in whose eyes old age was an unmixed evil; for it was a dead weight in the struggle for life, and gave the old man no chance against his younger and stronger competitors.[3] All the fifth century poets—Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides—are at one concerning it; and the finest of their lyric odes mourn the feebleness, the friendlessness, and the hopelessness of declining years.
87. Prophets and heralds are seldom agreeable personages in his plays. There is, indeed, a highly-cultivated and politically-trained herald in the Supplices, who argues about constitutions with Theseus; but elsewhere heralds are bold and violent assertors of injustice (Copreus), or mere slaves to carry out the worst commands of their masters (Talthybius). There is no other prominent prophet upon his stage. In the Bacchæ and Phœnissæ, Teiresias is treated with respect; and the prophetess Theonoe (Helena) is a merciful and tender woman. But in many plays the outspoken contempt for this profession seems to indicate the poet's feelings.
It must be remembered, before we leave these minor characters, that they occupied by no means so important a place in the Greek drama as they do in modern plays. The plays of Æschylus and Sophocles only admit (with rare exceptions) of three actors, and any additional parts must either be undertaken (with change of dress) by one of the three, or be quite insignificant. Hence a talented young actor had no opportunity of making his character by a fine reading of a small part, nor do we find that the poets attempted any elaborate character drawing by stray touches in such figures, as is often the case in good modern plays. These are the sort of contrasts which made Greek plays far more different from ours than is apparent at first reading. What we consider delicacy in play of feature, and grace of gesture, must have been impossible under the mask and tragic inflation of the figure which the Greeks thought necessary for its dignity. But of course the less the actor could do, the more the poet must compensate by the real excellence of his dialogue, and the pathos of his scenes. Thus the shackles of an art are often the very causes of its most splendid products.
- ↑ His part in the Andromache is not worth noticing here.
- ↑ The case of Menœkeus in the Phœnissæ (vv. 980 sqq.), is, I think, the only other example. His speech is very splendid, but he passes across the scene like a meteor, and has not sufficient importance to take his place among the protagonists.
- ↑ Nothing can be stronger than the despairing speech of Iphis, in the Supplices (v. 1080), who concludes with these words:
ὦ δυσπάλαιστον γῆρας, ὡς μισῶ σ᾽ ἔχων,
μισῶ δ᾽ ὅσοι χρῄζουσιν ἐκτείνειν βίον
βρωτοῖσι καὶ ποτοῖσι καὶ μαγεύμασι
παρεκτρέποντες ὄχετον ὥστε μὴ θανεῖν·
οὓς χρῆν, ἐπειδὰν μηδὲν ὠφελῶσι γῆν,
θάνοντας ἔρρειν κἀκποδὼν εἶναι νέοις.