IV
It is clear at a glance that the Alcestis belongs to an epoch of extreme sophistication. Everything has been thought out and polished; every ornament is a poem. If a character has to give five words of explanation or of prayer, it is done in silver. The tone is all the tone of cultivated society, the appeal is an appeal to the refined, casuistical intelligence. The smile of Voltaire is all through Greek literature; and it was not until the age of Louis XIV, or the Regency, that the modern world was again to know a refinement and a sophistication which recall the Greek work. Now, in one word,—this subtlety which pleases us in matters of sentiment is the very thing that separates us from the Greek upon the profoundest questions of philosophy. Where religious or metaphysical truth is touched upon, either Greek sophistication carries us off our feet with a rapture which has no true relation to the subject, or else we are offended by it. We do not understand sophistication. The Greek has pushed aesthetic analysis further than the modern can bear. We follow well enough through the light issues, but when the deeper questions are reached we lose our footing. At this point the modern cries out in applause, 'Religion, philosophy, pure feeling, the soul!'—He cries out, 'Mystic cult, Asiatic influence, Nature worship,—deep things over there!'—Or else he cries, 'What amazing cruelty, what cynicism!' And yet it is none of these things, but only the artistic perfection of the work which is moving us. We are the victims of clever stage-management.
The cruder intelligence is ever compelled to regard the man of complex mind as a priest or as a demon. The child, for instance, asks about the character in a story, 'But is he a good man or a bad man, papa?' The child must have a moral explanation of anything which is beyond his æsthetic comprehension. So also does the modern intelligence question the Greek.
The matter is complicated by yet another element, namely stage convention. Our modern stage is so different from the classic stage that we are bad judges of the Greek playwright's intentions. The quarrels which arise as to allegorical or secondary meanings in a work of art are generally connected with some unfamiliar feature of its setting. A great light is thrown upon any work of art when we show how its form came into being, and thus explain its primary meaning. Such an exposition of the primary or apparent meaning is often sufficient to put all secondary meanings out of court. For instance: It is, as we know, the Germans who have found in Shakespeare a coherent philosophic intention. They think that he wrote plays for the purpose of stating metaphysical truths. The Englishman does not believe this, because the Englishman is familiar with that old English stage work. He knows its traditions, its preoccupation with story-telling, its mundane character, its obliviousness to the sort of thing that Germany has in mind. The Englishman knows the conventions of his own stage, and this protects him from finding mares'-nests in Shakespeare. Again, Shakespeare's sonnets used to be a favorite field for mystical exegesis, until Sir Sidney Lee explained their form by reference to the sixteenth-century sonnet literature of the continent. This put to flight many theories.
In other words, the appeal to convention is the first duty of the scholar. But, unfortunately, in regard to the conventions of the Classic Stage, the moderns are all in the dark. Nothing like that stage exists to-day. We are obliged to make guesses as to its intentions, its humor, its relation to philosophy. If the classics had only possessed a cabinet-sized drama, like our own, we might have been at home there. But this giant-talk, this megaphone-and-buskin method, offers us a problem in dynamics which staggers the imagination. All we can do is to tread lightly and guess without dogmatizing. The typical Athenian, Euripides, was so much deeper-dyed in skepticism than any one since that day, that really no one has ever lived who could cross-question him—let alone expound the meanings of his plays. In reading Euripides, we find ourselves, at moments, ready to classify him as a satirist, and at other moments as a man of feeling. Of course he was both. Sometimes he seems like a religious man, and again, like a charlatan. Of course he was neither. He was a playwright.