Literary and General Lectures and Essays | Page 2

paltry and unmeaning relic-- "when," as the learned
O. Muller says, "the desire of escaping from self into something new
and strange, of living in an imaginary world, broke forth in a thousand
ways; not merely in revelry and solemn though fantastic songs, but in a
hundred disguises, imitating the subordinate beings--satyrs, pans, and
nymphs, by whom the god was surrounded, and through whom life
seemed to pass from him into vegetation, and branch off into a variety
of beautiful or grotesque forms--beings who were ever present to the
fancy of the Greeks, as a convenient step by which they could approach
more nearly to the presence of the Divinity." But even out of that
seemingly bare chaos, Athenian genius was learning how to construct,
under Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes, that elder school of comedy,
which remains not only unsurpassed, but unapproachable, save by
Rabelais alone, as the ideal cloudland of masquerading wisdom, in
which the whole universe goes mad--but with a subtle method in its
madness.
Yes, so it has been, under some form or other, in every race and
clime--ever since Eve ate of the magic fruit, that she might be as a god,
knowing good and evil, and found, poor thing, as most have since, that
it was far easier and more pleasant to know the evil than to know the
good. But that theatre was built that men might know therein the good
as well as the evil. To learn the evil, indeed, according to their light,
and the sure vengeance of Ate and the Furies which tracks up the
evil-doer. But to learn also the good-- lessons of piety, patriotism,
heroism, justice, mercy, self- sacrifice, and all that comes out of the
hearts of men and women not dragged below, but raised above
themselves; and behind all--at least in the nobler and earlier tragedies
of AEschylus and Sophocles, before Euripides had introduced the
tragedy of mere human passion; that sensation tragedy, which is the
only one the world knows now, and of which the world is growing
rapidly tired--behind all, I say, lessons of the awful and unfathomable
mystery of human existence--of unseen destiny; of that seemingly
capricious distribution of weal and woe, to which we can find no
solution on this side the grave, for which the old Greek could find no
solution whatsoever.

Therefore there was a central object in the old Greek theatre, most
important to it, but which did not exist in the old Roman, and does not
exist in our theatres, because our tragedies, like the Roman, are mere
plays concerning love, murder, and so forth, while the Greek were
concerning the deepest relations of man to the Unseen.
The almost circular orchestra, or pit, between the benches and the stage,
was empty of what we call spectators--because it was destined for the
true and ideal spectators--the representatives of humanity; in its centre
was a round platform, the [Greek]--originally the altar of
Bacchus--from which the leader of these representatives, the leader of
the Chorus, could converse with the actors on the stage and take his
part in the drama; and round this thymele the Chorus ranged with
measured dance and song, chanting, to the sound of a simple flute, odes
such as the world had never heard before or since, save perhaps in the
temple-worship at Jerusalem. A chorus now, as you know, merely any
number of persons singing in full harmony on any subject. The Chorus
was then in tragedy, and indeed in the higher comedy, what Schlegel
well calls "the ideal spectator"--a personified reflection on the action
going on, the incorporation into the representation itself of the
sentiments of the poet, as the spokesman of the whole human race. He
goes on to say (and I think truly), "that the Chorus always retained
among the Greeks a peculiar national signification, publicity being,
according to their republican notions, essential to the completeness of
every important transaction." Thus the Chorus represented idealised
public opinion; not, of course, the shifting hasty public opinion of the
moment--to that it was a conservative check, and it calmed it to
soberness and charity--for it was the matured public opinion of
centuries; the experience, and usually the sad experience, of many
generations; the very spirit of the Greek race.
The Chorus might be composed of what the poet would. Of ancient
citizens, waiting for their sons to come back from the war, as in the
"Agamemnon" of AEschylus; of sea-nymphs, as in his "Prometheus
Bound;" even of the very Furies who hunt the matricide, as in his
"Eumenides;" of senators, as in the "Antigone" of Sophocles; or of
village farmers, as in his "OEdipus at Colonos"--and now I have named

five of the greatest poems, as I hold, written by mortal man till Dante
rose. Or it