Literary and General Lectures and Essays | Page 2

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 may be the Chorus was composed--as in the comedies of Aristophanes, the greatest humorist the world has ever seen--of birds, or of frogs, or even of clouds. It may rise to