Greek tragedy

by Gilbert Norwood

Hither bend thy sweeping pinion,

Where, ’neath woes that leave it never

Lies a princely house forlorn.

The whole progress of the later scenes is splendidly exciting, and in the midst Euripides has set the audacious scene of the Phrygian slave who replaces the conventional messenger’s speech with his wild lyrical narrative, incoherent and baffling. Equally brilliant is the finale in which actual lunacy confronts the delirium of despair and grief, with the frail victim flung upon the parapet, the knife brandished in the madman’s grasp, and the flames which are to end the horror already rising behind.

The Bacchæ[740] (Βάκχαι), or Bacchantes (female votaries of the god Bacchus or Dionysus), was produced in 405 B.C., soon after the poet’s death in Macedonia, and with its companion-plays obtained the first prize.

Dionysus, standing before the palace of Thebes, tells how, disguised as a prophet, he has brought his religion into Greece. His purpose in Thebes is to punish the sisters of his mother Semele for declaring that their sister had united herself not with Zeus but with some mortal, and to crush the young king Pentheus, who opposes his worship. Already the Theban women are revelling upon Mount Cithæron, filled with the Bacchic ecstasy. He departs to join them, and the chorus of Phrygian votaresses throng in uttering a rapturous eulogy of their religion. Tiresias and Cadmus are next seen preparing to join the revels, when Pentheus enters and reproaches them. Their answers enrage him further and he orders the arrest of the stranger-prophet. The chorus appeal to Holiness against the oppressor, reciting the blessings of Dionysus and the doom of pride; they yearn to revel unchecked. The Stranger is brought in; Pentheus questions and insults him, finally haling him away to the stables. The chorus sing their indignation and desire for the aid of Dionysus in person when the prophet is heard summoning fire and earthquake; the women in frenzy greet the overthrow of the palace. Their leader comes forth and relates how Pentheus in vain sought to bind him and how the god has thrown the house into utter ruin. Pentheus rushes out in fury, but is met by a rustic who relates the revels and miracles performed by the Theban votaresses. This excites the king still further, but the Stranger dissuades him from the use of armed force; let him go disguised as a woman to witness the revels. Pentheus retires into the palace with the prophet, who reveals the king’s coming doom to the chorus; they rejoice in their future freedom and the fate of the ungodly. Pentheus re-appears, dressed as a female reveller and utterly under the Stranger’s influence. The two depart for the mountains, the king being now practically imbecile. The chorus fiercely call for bloody vengeance, then praise the humble endeavour after all that is beautiful in life. A messenger returns with the story of Pentheus’ death: he has been torn to pieces by his mother Agave and her companions. Agave enters in mad triumph with her son’s head, followed by Cadmus, who bears the mangled remains of his grandson and gradually brings Agave back to her senses. He laments[741] the prince who was the comfort of his old age.[742] Dionysus appears in the sky, foretells the future of Cadmus and his wife, and explains that the present sorrows are due to the will of Zeus. Agave turns away, repudiating the new religion.

Intoxicatingly beautiful, coldly sordid, at one moment baffling the brain, at the next thrilling us with the mystic charm of wood and hillside, this drama stands unique among Euripides’ works. Its wonderful effect flows from three sources: primitive dramaturgy, lyrical beauty, the enigma of its theological import. As for the first of these, there is a marked simplicity both of plot and characters. A god brings a strange worship into the land of his birth; the king rejects and scorns him; whereupon the god turns his people to madness so that they avenge him upon the king. It is the simplest possible dramatic concept. If we consider the personages, comparing Agave with Phædra or Medea, Pentheus with Ion or Hippolytus, we find an equal simplicity. The characters of the Bacchæ impress us less by their subtle truth to nature than by the situation in which they stand. In this sense the Bacchæ is the most Æschylean work of Euripides. Like his predecessor when he composed the Choephorœ, he is studying directly a great religious fact, which submerges the refinements of individual psychology, leaving somewhat stark figures, the God, the Old Man, the King, the Prophet, and the Woman.[743] In technique we are not far from that primitive stage of modern drama which exhibits the interplay of Avarice, Lovingkindness, and the rest. This imparts an even greater attractiveness to the amazing literary excellence of the whole. This excellence is of two distinct kinds. The episodes are not filled with romantic beauty—only a few splendid passages in the long narratives of messengers exhibit this; they show the same mastery of a brilliant half-prosaic idiom which is familiar elsewhere. But the lyrics are the poet’s finest achievement in this field. Nothing that he had created hitherto can be compared with them, save the praises of Attica in the Medea[744] and the song of escape in the Hippolytus.[745] The profound beauty of their musings on the life of serene piety, the startling vividness wherewith they express the secluded loveliness which haunts bare peaks or remote woodlands, the superb torrent of glowing song[746] which celebrates the religious ecstasy of Dionysiac votaries, where the glorious diction is swept along by a tempest of ever more tumultuous rhythm—all these contribute to make the Bacchæ something precious and alone.

It is with regard to the third feature, the theological purport, that disagreement begins among critics. Is the playwright commending the Bacchic religion to his fellow-countrymen or is he not? If not, why this magnificent and intense proclamation of the glory conferred by belief? But if he supports it, why this dreary aching scene at the end, when Dionysus hears no voice raised in loyalty, only the despairing accents of the woman who repudiates his worship? It may be objected that perhaps we should not hope for definite interpretation, that since “like a live thing it seems to move and show new faces every time that, with imagination fully working, one reads the play,”[747] perhaps there is no core of central fact to find. Here lurks a dangerous confusion of thought. Every work of art springs from a definite concept held by the artist, some piece of reality clearly understood and sincerely felt, insisting on expression at his hands precisely because it affects him emotionally. The elusiveness of the final expression is not in the least degree any proof that no definite doctrine, or experience, or passionate wish, was its origin; a fern has a physical centre of gravity as truly as an apple, though more difficult to locate. Rather, the luxuriant freedom is the proof that there is deep down something definite, else the freedom would be anarchy. We conclude that however enigmatic is the Bacchæ, yet Euripides had a definite opinion about the two questions: Does the god Dionysus exist? Is his religion a blessing to humanity? His opinion could have been written down in a few lucid sentences. Had this not been so, he would have postponed beginning his play until it was. This clear concept may itself indicate “doubt” (if we insist on the word) or rather a bifurcation of truth, as may be observed in the dramaturgy of Sophocles.

There is, then, a secret to be discovered. Is it lost for ever, or not? It appears to some[748] that the drama contains evidence, unmistakable but long overlooked, which conveys Euripides’ opinion concerning Dionysus. The chief, the only certain, clue is contained in the “Palace-Miracle”. The facts are, that the chorus cry aloud at the tottering of the building; that Dionysus a moment later when relating what has happened within, adds, “And this further evil hath Bacchus wrought upon him: he hath flung his dwelling to the ground, where it lies all in ruin”;[749] that, finally, the palace is as a fact uninjured. This latter point is proved by the complete silence of all the personages, except Dionysus and the chorus. Neither Cadmus nor Agave, nor the two messengers, at their several entrances make the least remark about it. Above all, Pentheus, who was within the house when the overthrow is alleged to have occurred, says nothing about it. Later the prince and his enemy enter the palace before proceeding to Cithæron, again with no hint that the building has been destroyed. It follows that the statements made by the chorus and by Dionysus are untrue.[750] The women believe what their leader cries out from within and what he tells them later. That is, they accept what their own eyes tell them is false. Only one power can work this marvel of belief—hypnotism, or, as earlier ages would call it, magic. The Dionysus of this play is precisely what Pentheus calls him, a “foreign wizard,”[751] no god at all, but a human hierophant of the new religion. Brought up in Western Asia, he combines a profound feeling for natural religion with an un-Greek leaning to orgiastic ecstasy and an instinct for fiendish cruelty; so that in spreading the gospel of joy and simple surrender to the mystic loveliness of Nature he crushes those who reject him, not destroying them in passion, but working their misery with a horrible cold relish: he is Shakespeare’s Richard the Third with religious instead of political ambitions. As for the Dionysiac religion itself, the poet feels its vast emotional appeal—feels it so strongly that he has drawn the most wonderful picture of ecstatic religion to be found in literature; but if it is proposed to him as “a way of life” for civilized men he condemns it as firmly as unwillingly. To give free rein to passions and instincts hitherto unconscious or starved, this is a path, perhaps the only path, towards strangely beautiful experience, the thrill of communion with non-human life; but it is not the path for man. Here Euripides stands at one with the great European tradition. If man is to attain the height of his destiny he will seek not the gold of joy but the silver of happiness, not the blazing rapture of absorption in strange beauty, but the calm glow of self-understanding and self-expression. He will not seek to destroy the instinct for ecstasy, but will harness it, and work it into the fabric of a sound coherent life. He may be a spectator, it is true, if not of all time, yet of all existence; his eyes will shrink from nothing, but his heart is not to be reft from him. He must prove all things, but hold fast only that which is good—a moral being, not the slave of sound and colour. In this drama, where Euripides seems to voice like some pagan archangel the glory of a non-moral absorption in the torrent of raw life, he is fundamentally as moral as at any moment in life. As Tannhäuser after his sojourn in the Venusberg is at length won back by the urgency of his own soul into the Roman Church, so does Euripides unflinchingly present, to an audience still breathing hard after the glories of Cithæron, Agave and Cadmus bowed over Pentheus’ mangled body, and the rejection of a god whose unmitigated demands imply the wreckage of sound human life.