Literary and General Lectures and Essays | Page 5

and were forthcoming, for each of the great festivals, and if
a piece was represented a second time it was usually after an interval of
some years. They did not, moreover, like the moderns, run every night
to some theatre or other, as a part of the day's amusement. Tragedy, and
even comedy, were serious subjects, calling out, not a passing sigh, or
passing laugh, but all the higher faculties and emotions. And as serious
subjects were to be expressed in verse and music, which gave
stateliness, doubtless, even to the richest burlesques of Aristophanes,
and lifted them out of mere street-buffoonery into an ideal fairyland of
the grotesque, how much more stateliness must verse and music have
added to their tragedy! And how much have we lost, toward a true
appreciation of their dramatic art, by losing almost utterly not only the
laws of their melody and harmony, but even the true metric time of

their odes!--music and metre, which must have surely been as noble as
their poetry, their sculpture, their architecture, possessed by the same
exquisite sense of form and of proportion. One thing we can
understand--how this musical form of the drama, which still remains to
us in lower shapes, in the oratorio, in the opera, must have helped to
raise their tragedies into that ideal sphere in which they all, like the
"Antigone," live and move. So ideal and yet so human; nay rather, truly
ideal, because truly human. The gods, the heroes, the kings, the
princesses of Greek tragedy were dear to the hearts of Greek
republicans, not merely as the founders of their states, not merely as the
tutelary deities, many of them, of their country: but as men and women
like themselves, only more vast; with mightier wills, mightier virtues,
mightier sorrows, and often mightier crimes; their inward free-will
battling, as Schlegel has well seen, against outward circumstance and
overruling fate, as every man should battle, unless he sink to be a brute.
"In tragedy," says Schlegel--uttering thus a deep and momentous
truth--"the gods themselves either come forward as the servants of
destiny and mediate executors of its decrees, or approve themselves
godlike only by asserting their liberty of action and entering upon the
same struggles with fate which man himself has to encounter." And I
believe this, that this Greek tragedy, with its godlike men and manlike
gods, and heroes who had become gods by the very vastness of their
humanity, was a preparation, and it may be a necessary preparation, for
the true Christian faith in a Son of Man, who is at once utterly human
and utterly divine. That man is made in the likeness of God--is the root
idea, only half-conscious, only half-expressed, but instinctive, without
which neither the Greek Tragedies nor the Homeric Poems, six hundred
years before them, could have been composed. Doubtless the idea that
man was like a god degenerated too often into the idea that the gods
were like men, and as wicked. But that travestie of a great truth is not
confined to those old Greeks. Some so-called Christian theories--as I
hold--have sinned in that direction as deeply as the Athenians of old.
Meanwhile, I say, that this long acquiescence in the conception of
godlike struggle, godlike daring, godlike suffering, godlike martyrdom;
the very conception which was so foreign to the mythologies of any
other race--save that of the Jews, and perhaps of our own Teutonic

forefathers--did prepare, must have prepared men to receive as most
rational and probable, as the satisfaction of their highest instincts, the
idea of a Being in whom all those partial rays culminated in clear, pure
light; of a Being at once utterly human and utterly divine; who by
struggle, suffering, self-sacrifice, without a parallel, achieved a victory
over circumstance and all the dark powers which beleaguer main
without a parallel likewise.
Take, as an example, the figure which you know best--the figure of
Antigone herself--devoting herself to be entombed alive, for the sake of
love and duty. Love of a brother, which she can only prove, alas! by
burying his corpse. Duty to the dead, an instinct depending on no
written law, but springing out of the very depth of those blind and yet
sacred monitions which prove that the true man is not an animal, but a
spirit; fulfilling her holy purpose, unchecked by fear, unswayed by her
sisters' entreaties. Hardening her heart magnificently till her fate is
sealed; and then after proving her godlike courage, proving the
tenderness of her womanhood by that melodious wail over her own
untimely death and the loss of marriage joys, which some of you must
know from the music of Mendelssohn, and which the late Dean Milman
has put into English thus:
Come, fellow-citizens, and see The desolate Antigone. On