Literary and General Lectures and Essays | Page 6

the last path
her steps shall treed, Set forth, the journey of the dead, Watching, with
vainly lingering gaze, Her last, last sun's expiring rays.
Never to see it, never more, For down to Acheron's dread shore, A
living victim am I led To Hades' universal bed. To my dark lot no
bridal joys Belong, nor o'er the jocund noise Of hymeneal chant shall
sound for me, But death, cold death, my only spouse shall be.
Oh tomb! Oh bridal chamber! Oh deep-delved And strongly-guarded
mansion! I descend To meet in your dread chambers all my kindred,
Who in dark multitudes have crowded down Where Proserpine
received the dead. But I, The last--and oh how few more miserable!--
Go down, or ere my sands of life are run.
And let me ask you whether the contemplation of such a self-sacrifice

should draw you, should have drawn those who heard the tale nearer to,
or farther from, a certain cross which stood on Calvary some 1800
years ago? May not the tale of Antigone heard from mother or from
nurse have nerved ere now some martyr-maiden to dare and suffer in an
even holier cause?
But to return. This set purpose of the Athenian dramatists of the best
school to set before men a magnified humanity, explains much in their
dramas which seems to us at first not only strange but faulty. The
masks which gave one grand but unvarying type of countenance to each
well-known historic personage, and thus excluded the play of feature,
animated gesture, and almost all which we now consider as "acting"
proper; the thick-soled cothurni which gave the actor a more than
human stature; the poverty (according to our notions) of the scenery,
which usually represented merely the front of a palace or other public
place, and was often though not always unchanged during the whole
performance; the total absence, in fact, of anything like that scenic
illusion which most managers of theatres seem now to consider as their
highest achievement; the small number of the actors, two, or at most
three only, being present on the stage at once,--the simplicity of the
action, in which intrigue (in the playhouse sense) and any complication
of plot are utterly absent; all this must have concentrated not the eye of
the spectator on the scene, but his ear upon the voice, and his emotions
on the personages who stood out before him without a background,
sharp-cut and clear as a group of statuary, which is the same, place it
where you will, complete in itself--a world of beauty, independent of
all other things and beings save on the ground on which it needs must
stand. It was the personage rather than his surroundings, which was to
be impressed by every word on the spectator's heart and intellect; and
the very essence of Greek tragedy is expressed in the still famous
words of Medea:
Che resta? Io.
Contrast this with the European drama--especially with the highest
form of it--our own Elizabethan. It resembles, as has been often said in
better words than mine, not statuary but painting. These dramas affect

colour, light, and shadow, background whether of town or country,
description of scenery where scenic machinery is inadequate, all, in fact,
which can blend the action and the actors with the surrounding
circumstances, without letting them altogether melt into the
circumstances; which can show them a part of the great whole, by
harmony or discord with the whole universe, down to the flowers
beneath their feet. This, too, had to be done: how it became possible for
even the genius of a Shakespeare to get it done, I may with your leave
hint to you hereafter. Why it was not given to the Greeks to do it, I
know not.
Let us at least thank them for what they did. One work was given them,
and that one they fulfilled as it had never been fulfilled before; as it will
never need to be fulfilled again; for the Greeks' work was done not for
themselves alone but for all races in all times; and Greek Art is the
heirloom of the whole human race; and that work was to assert in
drama, lyric, sculpture, music, gymnastic, the dignity of man--the
dignity of man which they perceived for the most part with their intense
aesthetic sense, through the beautiful in man. Man with them was
divine, inasmuch as he could perceive beauty and be beautiful himself.
Beauty might be physical, aesthetic, intellectual, moral. But in
proportion as a thing was perfect it revealed its own perfection by its
beauty. Goodness itself was a form--though the highest form--of beauty.
[Greek] meant both the physically beautiful and the morally good;
[Greek] both the ugly and the bad.
Out of this root-idea sprang the whole