CHAPTER II.
ŒDIPUS THE KING.
No tragedy in history or in fiction can equal the horror of the tale of Œdipus. The plot is so simple as to be told in a sentence. An oracle foretells that Œdipus shall slay his father and be married to his mother; and, against his own will and knowledge, he fulfils his destiny. By a sudden revolution of fortune we see a man, to all appearance as wise as Solomon and as blameless as Job, hurled into an abyss of misery and despair; and this by a chain of circumstances of whose real import he is himself unconscious until the final catastrophe. It is a case where the punishment seems out of all proportion to the crime. Even when we take into account the passion, the pride, and the curiosity of Œdipus, we still feel that the criminal has been in a measure "the victim of a mistake"—that he is a mere puppet in the hands of some superior and relentless power. And yet this Fatality, to which Œdipus is subject, is not so great or capricious as at first sight it seems to be. It is true that chance and misfortune are the means which it makes use of for the accomplishment of its purpose, but it uses them for the ends of Justice. "The real instruments," says M. Girardin, " by which Fate works, are men's unbridled passions; it strikes down the murderer by the murderer, and punishes the crime by the crime. But Justice appears beyond and above these furious impulses, and directs them, in spite of themselves, to that mysterious goal towards which it tends."[1] To the audience, who knew the story well, no suspense could have been so agonising as to watch the misguided king rushing headlong to his doom—to see him weaving himself the fatal chain of evidence which was to convict him of murder and incest,—and this without their being able to raise a voice to warn, or to stretch out a hand to save. And mingled with this feeling was that indefinable sympathetic fear—always strongly excited by the sight of sufferings to which we may be ourselves exposed—the dread which haunted each man among the audience lest he might himself some day prove an Œdipus. No one would have disclaimed the idea of his committing such monstrous sins with a more fervent sincerity than the criminal in this tragedy. "Is thy servant a dog, that he should do these things?" he would have asked; and yet, influenced by some mysterious impulse, he had done them all. And, lastly, the spectators must have felt that natural but selfish pleasure of looking down, like the gods of Epicurus, from the vantage-ground of their tiers of seats, on the storm of conflicting passions, the love and the rage, the hatred and the despair, which convulsed the actors on the stage. Lucretius describes this commonest of all feelings in well-known lines: "Sweet it is," says he, "when on the great sea winds are troubling the waters, to behold from land another's deep distress. . . . 'Tis sweet again to look upon armies battling on the plains without sharing in the danger."[2]
It was the skilful manner in which all these emotions are worked up by Sophocles in this play that caused Aristotle, the great critic, to select 'Œdipus the King' as the model and masterpiece of Tragedy.
We are carried back by the poet to the same mythic period, with no pretence to historical date, to which Shakspeare carries us back in his kindred play of 'King Lear'[3]—an age of giants, when men's passions were at blood-heat, when atrocious crimes were followed by atrocious vengeance, and when the general violence and brutality of manners is only relieved by brighter touches in such characters as Theseus and Kent, Cordelia and Antigone. Œdipus himself might well say with Lear, that "the best and soundest of his time had been but rashness."
Laius, king of Thebes, took for his wife Jocasta, "daughter of the wise Menœceus," but she bore him no children. Then in his distress he asked help of the god of Delphi; and the god declared that a son should be born to him, but by the hands of this son he should surely die. As soon as the child, the hero of this tragedy, is born, his mother intrusts him to a servant, with strict charge that he should be left to die in the wilderness. This cruel command is obeyed. The child's feet are pierced, cords are passed through them, and it is left hanging from a tree in the wildest pass of Mount Cithæron. There a shepherd finds it, and, moved with pity, carries it to his master Polybus, king of Corinth. The wife of Polybus, being childless, resolves to adopt the foundling as her own son, and thus the stranger is received into the palace, and is given the name of Œdipus—"Swell-foot." He grows up to manhood, never doubting that he is the son and heir of Polybus.
In the mean time King Laius had grown old, and thirty years after his child had been thus exposed, he made a second pilgrimage to consult the god of Delphi. From this pilgrimage he never returned, for on his way home he was attacked and slain by some unknown hand, at the spot where the road from Delphi branches off to Phocis and Bœotia. Creon succeeds him; but his reign is brief, for a monster, with the face of a woman, the wings of a bird, and the tail and claws of a lion, was bringing desolation on the city of Thebes. The Sphinx (as this monster was called) proposed a riddle which no Theban could solve; and the life of a citizen was the penalty for every failure. So terrible was the visitation, that Creon, in despair, offered the crown of Thebes and the hand of his sister Jocasta to any who could unravel the enigma and save the state.
At this crisis Œdipus, like the "fated fairy prince," comes to the rescue. He had left the court of Polybus, indignant at an insult offered him on the score of his unknown birth, and chance or destiny had brought him to Thebes. Corneille makes him tell his own story—how on his arrival at the foot of the fatal rock he sees the ground covered with the mangled limbs of former unlucky interpreters—how, in their despair, the perishing citizens make large proffers to the man who shall deliver them:—
"Le peuple offre le sceptre, et la reine son lit;
De cent cruelles morts cette offre est tôt suivie;
J'arrive, je l'apprens, j'y hazarde ma vie.
Au pied du roc affreux semé d'os blanchissants,
Je demande l'énigme, et j'en cherche la sens;
Et ce qu'aucun mortel n'avait encore pu faire,
J'en devoile l'image, et perce le mystère.
Le monstre, furieux de se voir entendu,
Venge aussitôt sur lui tout de sang répandu,
Du roc se lance en bas, et s'écrase lui-même,
La reine tint parole, et j'eus le diadême."
—Œdipe, Act i. sc. 4.
Both the riddle and the answer given have become matter of popular and well-known story; and it is difficult to understand the perplexity of the Thebans, for the enigma was of the simplest kind: "A being with four feet has two feet and three feet and only one voice; but its feet vary, and, when it has most, it is weakest." Professor Plumptre has thus translated the answer of Œdipus:—
"Hear thou against thy will, thou dark-winged Muse of the slaughtered;
Hear from my lips the end bringing a close to thy crime:
Man is it thou hast described, who, when on earth he appeareth,
First as a babe from the womb, four-footed creeps on his way,
Then when old age cometh on, and the burden of years weighs full heavy,
Bending his shoulders and neck, as a third foot useth his staff."[4]—(P.)
And so the successful adventurer is made king, and takes for his wife Jocasta, who had been the wife of Laius, and by her he has both sons and daughters. For some years all went well with Œdipus. He had children, and lands, and wealth, and honour, and all that helps to make life precious. He was happy in the affections of his family and in the loyalty of his subjects. "Heaven and earth are silent for a generation; one might fancy that they are treacherously silent, in order that Œdipus may have time for building up to the clouds the pyramid of his mysterious offences. His four children incestuously born—sons that are his brothers, daughters that are his sisters—have grown up to be men and women before the first mutterings are becoming audible of that great tide slowly coming up from the sea, which is to sweep away himself and the foundations of his house. Heaven and earth must now "bear joint witness against him. Heaven spoke first."[5] For some cause unknown to the inhabitants, the wrath of the gods fell upon the state, and every source of life was blasted with that curse which was believed to follow upon crime. Thebes groaned under the worst plagues which smote the land of Egypt. Pestilence came upon the cattle; mildew blighted the fruits of the earth; the first-born of women were swept away by some fatal and mysterious malady. The whole city—and those among the poet's audience who had been in Athens during the Great Plague could realise the description—was "full of the dead and dying." It was to no purpose that unceasing prayers were offered, and that incense steamed upon the altars. The gods remained deaf and dumb to all entreaties. The citizens in the first chorus tell the tale of their sufferings thus:—
"The nurslings of the genial earth
Wane fast away;
The children, blighted ere the birth,
See not the day,
And the sad mother bows her head,
And, with her treasure lost, sleeps 'mid the crowded dead.
One upon another driven,
Fleeter than the birds of heaven,
Fleeter than the fire-flood's might,
Rush they to the realms of night,
Where, beyond the western sea,
Broods the infernal Deity,
While our city makes her moan
O'er her countless children gone."—(A.)
Then at last the people, in their sorrow and despair, turn—as the plague-stricken Athenians turned to Pericles—to him who seemed to be the favourite of fortune, to the prince whose sagacity had once rescued them from the talons of the Sphinx; and in the opening scene of the play, a throng of citizens—young men and elders, priests and boys—are seated before the palace-doors of Œdipus, with boughs of laurel and olive, the emblems of supplication, in their hands. When the prince asks them the reason of their coming, they tell him of the plague and pestilence which "desolate the house of Cadmus," and implore him to lend his aid in this hour of their dire distress. Whether he be inspired by heaven, or trust to the "might of unassisted genius," let him repeat his former good work, and earn a second time the title of "Saviour of the State."
The answer of Œdipus is generous and dignified, and has all the complacency of gratified patriotism. Upon none (he says) have these evil days weighed more heavily than on himself: they have caused him many tearful and restless hours. He has long pondered over all possible modes of deliverance; and he has done what piety suggested—has laid his case before the gods, and is hourly expecting an answer from Delphi, whither Creon had been sent. Even as he speaks, Creon is seen approaching, with joy beaming from his eyes, and with his brows bound with a wreath of "Apollo's bays"—a badge which then bore the same sacred import as the palm-branch in the middle ages, for it marked the happy return of the pilgrim from the shrine of Delphi, believed by the Greek to be the centre of the earth, just as Jerusalem was by medieval Christendom.
For once (Creon avers) Apollo has spoken plainly. It is the guilt of innocent blood which troubles the land. Laius had been foully murdered by unknown hands; and until the murderer was banished, or blood was repaid by blood, there should be neither peace nor rest for the people of Cadmus. Œdipus then asks a train of questions, which (as critics remark) show a strange ignorance of circumstances which must have been well known to every Theban. Creon tells him how, when, and where the murder had taken place, as far as rumour went. One eyewitness had escaped, who talked of a "band of robbers" falling on the king; but these, like Falstaff's "men in buckram," were afterwards shown to have been invented to screen his own cowardice. Œdipus then reproaches the Thebans for their previous neglect, and announces that he will take upon himself the office of discovering and punishing the unknown criminal:—
"Right well hath Thebes, and right well hast thou
Shown for the dead your care, and ye shall find,
As is most meet, in me a helper true,
Aiding at once my country and my God."—(P.)
Then the deputation of citizens, having secured a champion, withdraws in procession from the stage, and Œdipus is left alone. "During this pause," says one of the most acute of modern critics, "the spectator has leisure to reflect how different all is from what it seems. The wrath of heaven has been pointed against the devoted city only that it might fall with concentrated force on the head of a single man; and he, who is its object, stands alone calm and serene. Unconscious of his own misery, he can afford pity for the unfortunate; and, as if in the plenitude of wisdom and power, he undertakes to trace the evil, of which he is himself the sole author, to its secret source."[6]
The Chorus of Theban citizens now enters, and, as in every chorus in Sophocles, their first ode is a solemn prayer. They draw a piteous picture of the miseries of Thebes, and they invoke its guardian gods to stay the plague which is wasting the inhabitants. Let them rise in defence of the city which has honoured them so well, and drive far away to the gloomy shores of Thrace the destroying angel who rides on the wings of pestilence.
"Lord of the starry heaven,
Grasping the terrors of the burning levin!
Let thy fierce bolt descend,
Scathe the Destroyer's might, and suffering Thebes befriend.
Speed thou here, Lycæan king,—
Archer, from whose golden string
Light the unerring arrows spring—
Apollo, lend thine aid!
And come, ye beams of wreathèd light,
Glancing on the silent night,
In mazy dance, on Lycia's height,
When roves the huntress maid.
Thou, the golden chaplet fair
Braiding 'mid thy clustering hair,
To thy native haunts repair,
Thy name that gave;
Thou, whose brow the vine-lees stain,
Thou, to whom on star-lit plain
'Evoe!' sing the frenzied train,—
Bacchus the brave!
With thy torch of pine defy
(Hated by the powers on high)
War's unhallowed deity:
Haste thee to save!"—(A.)
Then Œdipus addresses the Chorus, as representing the people of Thebes; and to the audience, who knew the story well, every word in his speech must have sounded like the bitterest irony, as they listened to the speaker unconsciously invoking upon his own head a curse as solemn and emphatic as that of Kehama.
He speaks as one of themselves—a citizen to citizens—"a stranger to the tale, a stranger to the deed." Should the murderer confess at once, banishment shall be his only punishment. Should any give a clue to his discovery, the informant shall have a reward and thanks. But if, after this gracious offer, the criminal or accomplice hold their peace—
"That man I banish, whosoe'er he be,
From out the land whose power and throne are mine;
And none may give him shelter, none speak to him,
Nor join with him in prayers and sacrifice,
Nor give him share in holy lustral stream;
But all shall thrust him from their homes, declared
Our curse and our pollution."—(P.)
All things conspire, continues Œdipus, to make him stand forth as the champion of the state, and "a helper to the god and to the dead." An illustrious prince has fallen, the land is smitten by the wrath of heaven; "and therefore," says the king—and his words carry with them a terrible significance—
"And therefore will I strive my best for him,
As for my father, and will go all lengths
To seek and find the murderer; and for me,
If in my house, I knowing it, he dwells,
May every curse I spake on my head fall!"
The Chorus at once protest their innocence and ignorance. They "neither slew, nor knew who slew."
Besides sending Creon to Delphi, Œdipus had also summoned Teiresias, the great Theban seer, who, like Calchas in the 'Iliad,'
"Knew all that is, and was, and is to be."
He had been deprived of his eyesight by Minerva for some offence, but the goddess, by way of atonement, had gifted him with such acute powers of hearing that he understood the language of all the birds of heaven. Even after death he retained his prophetic powers, and Ulysses himself sought the lower world to learn from his lips the secrets of the future, being, as the Chorus describe him here,
"The seer inspired of God,
With whom alone of all men truth abides."
Teiresias is led in by a boy, bearing the golden staff which was the badge of his augurial office. Œdipus addresses him with dignified courtesy, speaking "as a king to a king." The Theban seer (he declares) is the only saviour to whom they can look in their hour of need. Let him therefore use all his powers of prophecy, and rescue the city from the curse which troubles it, by pointing out the murderer of Laius. But Teiresias, who knows but too well the horror of the actual truth, refuses to answer. Œdipus vainly protests and implores; and at last, imputing his silence to conscious guilt, angrily charges him with having himself instigated or actually committed the crime. Then the prophet is in his turn roused to anger; the fire kindles, and he speaks with his tongue. It is Nathan's denunciation of David: "Thou art the man." Œdipus is not only incredulous, but furious, to think that an augur can be at once so old and so vile a slanderer, since he can neither see the brightness of earthly sunshine nor the pure light of inward truth, and is blind at once in mind and body. And then he moralises on the envy that haunts greatness. It must be Creon, his own familiar friend, who has conspired with this "juggling mountebank," and has hired him thus to prophesy deceit.[7] His very art of augury is a lie; for it was Œdipus, and not Teiresias, who had expounded the fatal riddle of the Sphinx. If it were not for his hoary hairs (such is the king's last threat), he should have had such a bitter lesson as would have taught him the peril of falsehood.
Then Teiresias, "strong in the might of truth," denounces that infatuation and blindness of heart which is far worse than the loss of eyesight. His own mind and reason are clairvoyant, while Œdipus is ignorant of his own birth, ignorant of the sin in which he is living. Fatal—continues the prophet, using a bold metaphor—is the harbour in which the king has moored his barque, lulled by a vain security, and terrible is the storm which shall soon break upon himself and on his children. A light shall be thrown on this mysterious murder; but
"No delight to him
Shall that discovery bring. Blind, having seen—
Poor, having rolled in wealth,—he, with a staff
Feeling his way, to a strange land shall go."—(P.)
And with this terrible prediction of the truth echoing in the ears of his audience, the prophet is led from the stage. Even Œdipus, scoffer and sceptic though he be, is struck by the reality of the augur's manner, and remains silent and perplexed, pondering over the last mysterious words relating to his birth, which Voltaire has well rendered
"Ce jour va vous donner la naissance et la mort" —
while the Chorus cannot restrain their terrible anxiety.
"Who," they ask, "can this unknown criminal be, that has dared deeds of such unutterable horror? It is high time for him to fly, swifter than the swiftest steed; for the god of prophecy is already on his track with the tardy but resistless power of doom. Though he lurks in some lonely cave or mountain glen, the living curse will haunt him."
It is hard (they conclude) to disbelieve the prophet of truth—harder still to believe that their king, the wise and good, is a guilty and polluted wretch; and so, until he be convicted by the clearest proofs, they will remember only the good deeds of Œdipus.
Creon now enters, and protests his innocence of the charge of conspiracy which Œdipus had brought against him; but hardly has he made his protest to the Chorus, when Œdipus appears, and angrily upbraids him with treasonable schemes. Creon rests his defence on grounds of common-sense—much in the style of Henry IV. 's famous speech to his son. Who could be so foolish (Creon asks) as to prefer
"To reign with fears than sleep untroubled sleep"?
As things are, he shares with Jocasta the counsels of the king. All men court and flatter him; why should he barter his ease and pleasure for
"The polished perturbation, golden care,
That keeps the ports of slumber open wide
To many a sleepless night"?[8]
He has no motive for acting a traitor's part, or for conspiring with Teiresias—
"Then charge me not with crime on shadowy proof;
For to thrust out a friend of noble heart
Is like the parting with the life we love."—(P.)
But, as Voltaire[9] observes with regard to this pas- sage, if a courtier accused of conspiracy should defend himself by such a commonplace, he would stand in great need of the clemency of his master. Certainly Œdipus is neither convinced nor reassured. Creon's skilful pleading only seems to him to prove that he can show equal skill in weaving plots; and he is proceeding to further accusations, when Jocasta herself enters, and strives to act the peacemaker between her husband and her brother. The Chorus join with her in urging Œdipus to forego his unjust suspicions. This is not the first time, says the queen, wishing to reassure her husband, that oracles have played men false. Laius had been warned that he should perish by the hands of his son—
"And yet, as rumour tells, where three ways meet,
By foreign ruffians was the monarch slain;"— (D.)
while the son who was to have killed his father was left to die in the wilderness.
Up to this moment we may suppose Œdipus to have been fully assured of his own innocence, and to have regarded the denunciation of Teiresias as the words of a madman or a traitor; but suddenly a chance expression of Jocasta causes a gleam of the real truth to flash across his mind. Where (he asks hurriedly and anxiously) was this spot "where three ways meet"? And the fatal answer comes—
"They call the country Phocis, and the roads
From Delphi and from Daulia there converge."
Then Œdipus, his suspicions being thus confirmed, in an agony of doubt asks question after question of the queen. Time, place, circumstances, all agree. Link after link in the fatal chain of evidence is closed about him, and each answer only makes it clearer that the words of Teiresias have been all too true. The king in his turn recounts his flight from Corinth, in dismay at the hideous destiny foretold to him by the Delphic god. He tells how on his journey he came to a place where three roads met; how he had been pushed from the road by an old grey-haired man, riding in a chariot, attended by a herald and servants; how blows had followed the insult; and how he had "slain them all." And, oh! the mockery of fate—the fearful "irony" of his threatened vengeance! It is on his own head that he has invoked that binding and irrevocable curse, which would be executed to the full by the relentless powers of destiny. What man upon earth can be more utterly miserable?
"Am I not born to evil, all unclean?
If I must flee, yet still in flight my doom
Is never more to see the friends I love,
Nor tread my country's soil; or else to bear
The guilt of incest, and my father slay;
Yea, Polybus, who brought me up.
***May I ne'er look
On such a day as that, but far away
Depart unseen from all the haunts of men."—(P.)
There is still a faint chance that, after all, Œdipus may be innocent; but it rests upon the chance expression of the slave, who had talked of "a band of robbers." Jocasta, indeed, is still incredulous, and is confident that this oracle will be proved as idle as the others; but, at any rate, the slave shall be summoned and examined.
In the pause of the action of the drama, the Chorus, left alone in possession of the stage, draw the same moral from the tale of Œdipus which the Chorus in 'Samson Agonistes' draws from him who had been
"The glory late of Israel, now the grief."
Woe to the man who walks proudly, fearing neither justice nor the eternal laws of a God who grows not old—who neither keeps his life from impious speech, nor his hands from profaning holy things. His downfall must be speedy and inevitable—
"Climbing oft, Pride seeks to dwell
Throned on Fortune's pinnacle;
Hurried from the summit straight
Down the vast abrupt of Fate;
Hurled from realms of highest bliss,
Sinks she in the dark abyss.
*****
God, in whom for aye I'll trust,
Holds His shield before the just!
But for the man whose heart is known
By haughty deed and lofty tone,
Spurning Heaven, and wrapt in self,
Led by sordid lust of pelf,—
Unto them may Fate dispense
Pride's unfailing recompense.
Conscience! thou to such canst deal
Heavier stroke than blade of steel;
Else, if man may Heaven defy,
If sleeps the vengeance of the sky—
Why this idle chant prolong?
Still be the dance, and hushed the song!"—(A.)
At this point begins the dénouement or disentanglement of the plot, in which. Sophocles was thought especially to excel.
A messenger arrives from Corinth, bringing what he conceives to be good news. Polybus is dead, and Œdipus has been elected by acclamation king of "the city on two seas." Jocasta—who, with a woman's fickleness, is on her way bearing flowers and incense to the altars of the god whom she had just insulted—meets the messenger, and is wild with joy when she hears her own opinion of the falsity of oracles, as she believes, thus undoubtedly confirmed; and she summons her husband, who, like her, exults at the tidings. Who need now believe that there is any truth in the Delphic god? Chance rules all; human foresight avails nothing; and oracles do but oppress the mind like a hideous dream.
But it is a false joy and a short-lived triumph. Œdipus himself is still haunted by a misgiving that the latter part of the prophecy may yet prove true; for Meropa, his reputed mother, is yet alive. Then the messenger, wishing to relieve him from this remaining dread, tells him the whole story of his birth—how he was in reality no son of Polybus, but a foundling exposed on Mount Cithæron; how he had been delivered by a shepherd of Laius to the very witness who now tells the tale; and how he in his turn had carried the child to Polybus.
There is one question still to be answered—one link still requisite to complete the chain of circumstantial evidence: "Who was the mother, and from whom had the shepherd received the child?"
Jocasta, who had at once realised the truth from the story of the Corinthian messenger, and who knows but too well what the answer of the shepherd must be, vainly tries to dissuade her husband from inquiring farther; and then, finding him obstinately bent on discovering the fatal secret of his birth, she can endure her grief no longer, but rushes from the stage in a silent agony of despair.
After a short interval of what must have been torturing suspense to Œdipus—an interval occupied by the Chorus in idle guesses as to what nymph or goddess could have nursed this "child of fortune"—the last fatal witness, the aged shepherd who, half a century before, had received the child of Laius from its mother, is led before the king. Forced to give his evidence on pain of death and torture, slowly and reluctantly—for he realises the horrible import of his words—he reveals all that he knows. And then Œdipus utters a wail of agony (and even across the lapse of years that loud and bitter cry pierces us with terrible reality)—
"Woe! woe! woe! woe! all cometh clear at last."—(P.)
Then he too flies in horror from the stage.
Again the Chorus mourn over the vanity of life, and again their lament is like that of the sons of Dan in 'Samson Agonistes'—
"O mirror of our fickle state,
Since man on earth unparalleled!
The rarer thy example stands,
By how much from the top of wondrous glory,
To lowest pitch of abject fortune thou art fallen."
Their king, who had once proved a tower of defence to his country in her hour of need, is now beset himself by countless sorrows. Would that the sin and death could be forgotten, and those guilty nuptials!
True to the principle of the Greek tragic drama, that horrors should not be acted in the presence of the audience, the rest of this miserable story is narrated by messengers. Jocasta, as we have seen, had left the scene suddenly and in ominous silence: she had dashed open the doors of the fatal bridal chamber; and when Œdipus had followed her, raging for a sword to slay her who had been the innocent cause of his misfortunes, he finds her, his wife and mother, hanging by a noose from the ceiling, already dead. Then he tears the body down with a wild cry, and wrenching the golden buckle from her dress, he dashes the point into the pupils of his eyes—thus condemning himself to that perpetual darkness with which he had taunted Teiresias. "His feeling," says Bishop Thirlwall, "is not horror of the light and of all the objects it can present to him, but indignation at his own previous blindness. The eyes which have served him so ill, which have seen without discerning what it was most important for him to know, shall be extinguished for ever."
Well might the messenger say, at the close of his speech, that in the tragedy which he had just recounted,
"Wailing and woe, and death and shame, all forms
That man can name of evil, none have failed."—(P.)
All the rivers of the earth could not wash away the pollution which clings to the house and family.
The palace-doors are now rolled back, and Œdipus comes forward with wild gestures, the gore still streaming from eyes that are "irrecoverably dark amid the blaze of noon." The Chorus, horror-stricken, cannot endure the sight, and hide their faces in their robes. Pity and consolation are out of place in the presence of such misery as his. They can only utter broken exclamations of sorrow and dismay. "What," they ask, "has prompted such an outrage? Why has he thus doomed himself to blindness"—
"As in the land of darkness, yet in light,
To live a life half-dead, a living death"?[10]
No man's hand has smitten him, replies Œdipus, save his own; but he has been fast bound to the wheels of a cruel necessity, and it is Apollo who has prompted such grim handiwork. Corneille gives the spirit of his justification;—
"Aux crimes malgrè moi l'ordre du ciel m'attache,
Pour m'y faire tomber a moi-même il me cache;
Il offre, en m'aveuglant sur ce qu'il a prédit,
Mon père à mon épée et ma mère à mon lit.
Hélas! qu'il est bien vrai qu'en vain on s'imagine
Derober notre vie à ce qu'il nous destine!"
—Œdipe, Act v. sc. 7.
Then he breaks out into passionate self-reproach, as he recalls with remorseful tenderness those old familiar scenes of his youth—
"All fair outside, all rotten at the core;"
the woodlands of Cithæron, the court of Polybus, and that "narrow pass where three ways met." No guilt or misery, he declares, can be like his. Let them then drive him forth from the city of his fathers, and let them hide him for ever from the sight of men, and from the light of day.
Creon now enters, and, with a nobility alien to his character in the succeeding play, refrains from casting either scorn or reproach on the fallen greatness of the king; and Œdipus, grateful for this kindness, makes his last request. Let them bury her who lies dead within the palace as becomes a king's daughter; for himself—he prays he may be allowed a "lodge in some vast wilderness," far removed from the scenes of his misery: his sons can take good care of themselves; but let pity be shown to his two daughters, who are left desolate, and to whom he wishes to bid farewell.
Creon had anticipated this wish, and Antigone and Ismene now enter. Œdipus is touched by this fresh kindness, and shows it:—
"A blessing on thee! May the Powers on high
Guard thy path better than they guarded mine!"—(P.)
Then, embracing his children, he mournfully dwells upon the dreary life that must await them, uncheered either by a parent's love or by a husband's affection; for the shame of their birth must mar all possible happiness. It lies in Creon's power to act a noble part, and prove himself a father to these fatherless children. Then the Chorus, turning to the spectators, bid them learn a lesson from the tale of Œdipus, who more than any other prince had
"Trod the paths of greatness,
And sounded all the depths and shoals of honour."
Let them mark how the favourite of fortune, the spoiled child of destiny, had fallen miserably from his high estate:—
"Mark him now dismayed, degraded, tossed on seas of wildest woes;
Think on this, short-sighted mortal, and, till life's deciding close,
Dare not to pronounce thy fellow truly happy, truly blest,
Till, the bounds of life passed over, still unharmed he sinks to rest."—(D.)
Here ends 'Œdipus the King,' as Sophocles has presented it to us. Its "sensational" character caused it to be frequently imitated. Julius Cæsar, Lucullus, and Seneca all wrote plays bearing the same name. Corneille adapted it to suit a French audience, introducing a host of minor characters, and improving the plot, according to his own ideas, by "the pleasing episode of the loves of Theseus and of Dirce"—the latter of whom he supposes to be the daughter and heiress of Laius. Dryden and Lee again adapted it for the English stage, with the inevitable ghost and "confidant;" and it was so performed at Drury Lane, when Mr Kemble took the part of Œdipus. But of all these translations and adaptations, none comes near the majestic simplicity of the story as told by Sophocles.
- ↑ Cours de Lit. Dramat., i. 189.
- ↑ Lucretius, ii. 1 (Munro's Transl.)
- ↑ Gervinus, Comment. on Shakspeare, ii. 204.
- ↑ De Quincey ingeniously suggests that, after all, the truer answer to the riddle lay in the word Œdipus, since he more than any other fulfilled the conditions of these three ages of man,—first crawling helplessly on his swollen feet; then "walking upright at noonday" in the vigour of manhood, vanquishing the Sphinx, and winning crown and bride by his own unaided natural powers; then, in the closing scene, thrust forth from home and country, guided by his devoted daughter, "the third foot that should support his steps when the deep shadows of his sunset were gathering and settling about his grave."
- ↑ De Quincey, The Theban Sphinx (Works, ix. 249).
- ↑ Bishop Thirlwall, "On the Irony of Sophocles," Philol. Museum, ii. 496.
- ↑ Seneca, in his tragedy of 'Œdipus,' introduces a wild scene of incantation, in which both Creon and Teiresias take part. They repair at midnight to a valley outside the walls of Thebes, where a grove of oak and cypress overhangs a stagnant pool of water. There the prince and the prophet dig a trench, light a fire, and offer a libation of wine and blood, accompanied by a solemn prayer, to Hecate and the Queen of Night. Then, amid the howling of dogs and the rolling of thunder, the earth heaves and is rent asunder, and the spirits of the legendary heroes of the house of Labdacus (father of Laius) rise from the lower world. Among this shadowy throng is the ghost of Laius, his grey hair still dabbled with blood; and, being conjured by Teiresias to declare the truth, he denounces Œdipus as his murderer.
- ↑ King Henry IV., P. I. Act iv. sc. 4.
- ↑ Lettres sur Œdipe, quoted by M. Patin, Etudes sur Sophocle.
- ↑ Samson Agon., 1. 99.