Scenes and Portraits

by Frederic Manning

"Of course I see that," answered Socrates; "but if you accept the idea of a universal mind animating all things, why should the misery and wretched conditions of the life of men dissipate this idea? Your play shows that it is man's own folly, and not the anger of the gods, that punishes him with misfortune. Theseus in ignorance calls down the doom of death upon Hippolytus, and thus brings evil upon himself. It is the lust of Phædra, and the blind anger of Theseus, which are responsible for the death of the innocent; but is it better to have suffered unjustly as Hippolytus suffered, or to die in shame, despised, as Phædra died, or to live as Theseus lived in misery, though forgiven?"

"I agree to what you have said of my play," answered Euripides, his worn, melancholy face illuminated with a smile; "and I agree, also, that it was my purpose to deny that the gods do evil, and to make people dissatisfied with the myths. I misunderstood the reason for your use of what the chorus says about the Supreme Mind; the doings of men seem to me to be more the result of the conditions of life than of their own wickedness. If men err it is through ignorance; but they suffer quite independently of their deserts. It is through my sympathy with mankind that I am led into doubt. Man struggles all his life with the fluctuations and vicissitudes of fortune; his pleasures are but phantoms and visions which elude his grasp; the one certainty before him is death: an unknown terror. Why has he been set among this play of circumstance, over which he has no control, but which whirls him away like a dead leaf upon the ripples and eddies of a river? The best happiness we can find in life is resignation, a folding of the hands, a withdrawal into the interior peace of our own minds, the serene heights which the Muses inhabit. Those who have gained that sanctuary have at least the happiness which comes from a knowledge of the limitations of life; they have learned to desire little, to delight in natural and simple things, the bright air, the coolness of forests, wind rippling the waves of corn and setting the poplar leaves a-tremble; but, alas! behind even this serenity of mind is the shadow of human suffering. So few are the wise, and so many the miserable! We would not, if we could, cut ourselves off from the dumb herd of humanity, with its obscure sufferings, its vague desires, its inarticulate and eternal pain."

"I should not ask it of you, Euripides," said Socrates gently.

He had a real love for Euripides, a real admiration for the mind which through its own tumult and discord had come at last into the possession of peace, and to the vision of a clear hope.

"If mankind with its blind follies makes me doubt the existence of a God," continued Euripides, "its miseries make me believe in one. I am not an enemy of knowledge; I have sought it with diligence all the days of my life; but we have other needs. We suffer with one another; there is a trouble and perplexity in the world from which we cannot escape, and to which we cannot refuse sympathy, pity, and love. Religion does not take into sufficient account the fact, that however diverse are the activities of men, all suffer alike. We have the corporate religious unity of the State, and it presents to us the noble and lofty ideas of the Olympian deities. Do you remember, Socrates, the fable which Protagoras made for you, describing how at first men had only the arts, and warred among themselves until Zeus sent them the gifts of justice and reverence?"

"Yes; I remember it. I cannot, of course, remember all that Protagoras said," answered Socrates. "Long speeches puzzle me. But I remember that it was beautiful."

"It was at my house," said Callias, with some pride.

"Well, Socrates, it seems to me that justice and reverence were not enough. Man needed something more. So the worship of Demeter and Dionysos was revealed to him. I have sometimes meditated writing a play about Dionysos, the enthusiasm of wine, of poetry, the Deliverer, who uplifts the heart of man; or about Demeter, the Earth, the herbage and the ripe corn, through whom we are kin, not only with each other but with the beasts of the field, the cattle grazing in their fat pasture, and the young fawn couched among the briars and thickets of the forest. These divinities seem closer to us than the ruler of the sun or the lord of the sea. They move gently among us, coming and going with the seasons, filling our granaries and wine-jars with their mystical gifts; corn and wine, their very bodies and blood, through which we enter into a close and intimate communion with them, and become indeed their children, or even themselves, as when their spirit possesses us entirely, and with a wild enthusiasm we range through the wooded hills, clothed in spotted fawn-skins, crowned with dark ivy, shaking the thyrsus in the air, and leaping to the sound of timbrels and pipes, and the brazen cymbals of the Great Mother.

"The Olympian divinities have given to man the knowledge of the arts, and instilled into him the principles of justice and of reverence; they are untouched by the sense of our human mortality.

"Of old, the poets say, they visited mortals; and coming to a house at dusk in the guise of huntsmen or travellers would rest that night to share the evening meal, and at dawn depart again, leaving behind them strange gifts. Now they come among us no more. But these divinities of our own delightful earth, how different they are! Our mortality, our labours, and our desires are part of their ritual. They have shown man that he is one with that earth from which he derives his being, and which receives him again, after the toils and vicissitudes of life, as with the gentle enfolding arms of a mother; and that through it he is one also with them. They give him, in the recurrence of seed-time and harvest, the symbolism of the vine and the vintage, the return of Spring, coming with frail, delicate flowers, and troops of swallows, in the first flush of green over the ploughlands, hints and foreshadowings of some such resurrection for himself; until death ceases to be a nameless terror to him, but is like a little interval of sleep not entirely barren of dreams. How natural they are too!