Nature from the beginning did more than man for the building, and now she has taken it back to herself again, blending Greek and Roman in binding of vine and flower and moss; twining all the stone-seated tiers into an herb and flower garden, and putting the song of birds into the vaulted halls of the Greek Chorus.
An enchanting place, where the Past seems to reveal itself in all that it had most of beauty and splendour. Peripatetica and Jane thought themselves fortunate to live under its wings; actually in its shadow, and so be on intimate calling terms at any hour of the day, learning its beauty familiarly through every changing transformation of light, cool morning’s grey and glowing noon’s gold, fiery sunsets, blue twilights, and early moonrise—mountains and sea and wide-flung sky dissolving magically and mysteriously into ever different pictures.
They wandered through chorus halls and dressing-rooms, the obscure regions under the stage and the dizzy ones on top of it; strolled in the outside arcade on top of the auditorium, where the loveliness of the view was a fresh wonder every time it burst on them, sat in the top rows and the bottom ones on the flowery sod now covering all the seats, looking from every angle at that most charming of marble stage settings and most wonderful of all backgrounds, trying to imagine the times when the surrounding tiers had been filled with 4,000 eager spectators, and the walls had echoed to the tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
Looking wonderingly at the curious drains and holes and underground passages below the stage, they wondered if Æschylus, that eminent stage manager as well as poet, had not himself perhaps contrived some of them on his visit to Sicily, to introduce new thrills of stage effects into the performances of his tragedies here. Æschylus, who was inventor of stage realism, first to introduce rich costuming, accessories, and stage machinery, the mutter of stage thunder, shrieks, and sounds from behind the scenes suggestive of the deeds considered too shocking to happen in the audience’s sight—inventor of the “Deus ex Machina,” that obliging god popping from out his trap-door to divinely straighten out a situation snarled past natural conclusion.
As one sat there in the calm splendour of the setting of earth and sky, sun, and great winds streaming overhead, it became easier to understand the spirit of the old Greek plays; how the drama had been to them not mere amusement but almost a form of religion, and an expounding of their beliefs, an attempt to “justify the ways of God to man.” If perhaps such settings had not instinctively formed the differing tendencies of their great play-writers; Æschylus to represent suffering as the punishment of sin; Sophocles to justify the law of God against the presumption of man; and in these spacious open-air settings if the great rugged elementary simplicity of their plays had not been necessary and inevitable.
“In the Greek tragedy the general point of view predominates over particular persons. It is human nature that is represented in the broad, not this or that highly specialized variation.... To the realization of this general aim the whole form of the Greek drama was admirably adapted. It consisted very largely of conversations between two persons representing two opposed points of view, and giving occasion for an almost scientific discussion of every problem of action raised in the play; and between these conversations were inserted lyric odes in which the chorus commented on the situation, bestowed advice or warning, praise or blame, and finally summed up the moral of the whole.”
More akin to an opera than to a play in our modern sense, the Greek drama had as its basis music. The song and stately dance of its mimetic chorus being the binding cord of the whole, “bringing home in music to the passion of the heart the idea embodied in lyric verse, the verse transfigured by song, and song and verse reflecting as in a mirror to the eye by the swing and beat of the limbs they stirred to consonance of motion.”
Sitting in the thyme-scented breeze Peripatetica and Jane read Euripides until they seemed to become a part of a breathless audience waiting for his tragedies to be performed before their eyes, waiting for the first gleam of the purple and saffron robes of the chorus, sweeping out from their halls in chanting procession. And it would all seem to take place once more on the stage in front of them, that feast for the eye and ear and intelligence at once. It became clear that across such great unroofed space the actors could not rely on “acting,” in our sense, for their results. It must be something bigger and simpler than any exact realism of petty actions; play of facial expression, subtle changes of voice and gesture would be ineffectually lost there. So, though at first the stage conventions of a different age seemed strange to these modern spectators, the actors raised above their natural height on stilted boots, their faces covered by masks, their voices mechanically magnified; yet in wonderful effects of statuesque posings the meaning came clear to the eye, and the chanting intonation brought out every beautiful measure of the rolling majestic verse which a realistic conversational delivery would have obscured. So the representation became “moving sculpture to the eye, and to the ear, as it were, a sleep of music between the intenser intervals of the chorus,” and the spectators found themselves “without being drawn away by an imitative realism from the calm of impassioned contemplation into the fever and fret of a veritable actor on the scene,” receiving all the beautiful lucid thought and sentiment of the text, heightened by the accompanying appeal to the senses of perfect groupings of forms and colours, of swaying dance, and song and recitative, until it all blended into one perfect satisfying whole—perhaps the most wonderful form of art production that has ever existed.
And then some German tourist would scream, “Ach Minna, komm mal her! ’s doch famos hier oben!” and they would be waked from their day dream of old harmonies into the shrill bustling present again.
“It is like all really great fresco painting,” said Peripatetica on one of these comings back, “kept in the flat. Anything huge has to be treated so as to make its meaning tell; it has to be done in flat outline to stay in the picture, to make the whole effective. All the great imposing frescoes are like that; when the seventeenth century tried to heighten its effects by moulding out arms and legs in the round, its pictures dropped to pieces; any idea it was trying to express became lost. One is conscious of nothing but the nearest sprawling realistic limb thrusting out at one. Oh, those delicious marvellous Greeks! everything that is beautiful and perfect they did first, and anything good that has ever been done since is only copying them.”