[121] Nem. viii.
[122] Pyth. vi.
[123] Compare, too, Nem. vii. 11, 62, 77.
[124] Pyth. viii. 30.
CHAPTER XII.
ÆSCHYLUS.
Life of Æschylus.—Nature of his Inspiration.—The Theory of Art in the Ion of Plato.—Æschylus and Sophocles.—What Æschylus accomplished for the Attic Drama.—His Demiurgic Genius.—Colossal Scale of his Work.—Marlowe.—Oriental Imagery.—Absence of Love as a Motive in his Plays.—The Organic Vitality of his Art.—Opening Scenes.—Messenger.—Chorus.—His Theology.—Destiny in Æschylus.—The Domestic Curse.—His Character-drawing.—Clytemnestra.—Difficulty of Dealing with the Prometheus.—What was his Fault?—How was Zeus justified?—Shelley's Opinion.—The Last Trilogy of Prometheus.—Middle Plays in Trilogies.—Attempt to Reconstruct a Prometheis.—The Part of Herakles.—Obscurity of the Promethean Legend.—The Free Handling of Myths permitted to the Dramatist.—The Oresteia.—Its Subject.—The Structure of the Three Plays.—The Agamemnon.—Its Imagery.—Cassandra.—The Cry of the King.—The Chorus.—Iphigeneia at the Altar.—Menelaus abandoned by Helen.—The Dead Soldiers on the Plains of Troy.—The Persæ.—The Crime of Xerxes.—Irony of the Situation.—Description of the Battle of Salamis.—The Style of Æschylus.—His Religious Feeling.
Æschylus, son of Euphorion, was born at Eleusis in 525 B.C. When he was thirty-five years of age, just ten years after the production of his first tragedy, he fought at Marathon. This fact is significant in its bearing on his art and on his life. Æschylus belonged to a family distinguished during the decisive actions of the Persian war by their personal bravery. Ameinias, his brother, gained the aristeia, or reward for valor, at the battle of Salamis; and there was an old picture in the theatre of Dionysus at Athens which represented the great deeds of the poet and his brother Cynægeirus at Marathon. Of his military achievements he was more proud than of his poetical success; for he mentions the former and is silent about the latter in the epitaph he wrote for his own tomb. Of his actual life at Athens, we only know this much, that he sided with the old aristocratic party. His retirement to Sicily after his defeat by Sophocles in 468 B.C. arose probably from the fact that Cimon, who adjudged the prize, was leader of the democratic opposition, and was felt to have allowed his political leanings to influence his decision. His second retirement to Sicily in 453 B.C., after the production of the Oresteia, in which he unsuccessfully supported the Areiopagus against Pericles, was due, perhaps, in like manner to his disagreement with the rising powers in the State. That at some period of his career he was publicly accused of impiety, because he had either divulged the mysteries of Demeter, or had offended popular taste by his presentation of the Furies on the stage, rests upon sufficient antique testimony. Such charges were not uncommon at Athens, as might be proved by the biographies of Anaxagoras and Socrates. But the exact nature of the prosecution directed against Æschylus is not known; we cannot connect it with any of his extant works for certain, or determine how far it affected his action. He died at Gela, in 456 B.C., aged sixty-nine, having spent his life partly at Athens and partly at the court of Hiero, pursuing in both places his profession of tragic poet and chorus-master.
Pausanias tells a story of his early vocation to dramatic art: "When he was a boy he was set to watch grapes in the country, and there fell asleep. In his slumber Dionysus appeared to him, and ordered him to apply himself to tragedy. At daybreak he made the attempt, and succeeded very easily." There is no reason that this legend should not have been based on truth. It was the general opinion of antiquity that Æschylus was a poet possessed by the deity, working less by artistic method than by immediate inspiration. Athenæus asserts crudely that he composed his tragedies while drunk with wine: μεθύων γοῦν ἔγραφε τὰς τραγῳδίας; and Sophocles is reported to have told him that "He did what he ought to do, but did it without knowing." Longinus, in like manner, after praising Æschylus for the audacity of his imagination and the heroic grandeur of his conceptions, adds that his plays were frequently unpolished, unrefined, ill-digested, and rough in style. Similar expressions of opinion might be quoted from Quintilian, who describes his style "as sublime and weighty, and grandiloquent often to a fault, but in most of his compositions rude and wanting in order." He adds that "the Athenians allowed later poets to correct his dramas and to bring them into competition under new forms, when many of them gained prizes." Æschylus seems, therefore, to have impressed critics of antiquity with the god-intoxicated passion of his genius rather than with the perfection of his style or the consummate beauty of his art. It is possible that he received less justice from his fellow-countrymen than we, who have been educated by the Shakespearian drama, can now pay him.
Æschylus might be selected to illustrate the artistic psychology of Plato. In the Phædrus Plato lays down the doctrine that poetic inspiration is akin to madness—an efflation from the Muses, a divine mania analogous to love. In the Ion he further develops this position, and asserts that "all good poets compose their beautiful poems not as works of art, but because they are inspired and possessed." The analogy which he selects is drawn from the behavior of Bacchantes under the influence of Dionysus. He wishes to distinguish between the mental operations of the poet and the philosopher, to show that the regions of poetry and science are separate, and to prove that rule and method are less sure guides than instinct when the work to be produced is a poem. "The poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him; when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles." The final dictum of the Ion is, "inspiration, not art"—θεῖον καὶ μὴ τεχνικόν. It is curious to find a Greek of the best age, himself in early days a poet, and throughout distinguished by genius allied to the poetic, thus boldly and roundly stating a theory which corresponds to the vulgar notion that poetry comes by nature, untutored and untaught, and which seems to contradict the practice and opinion of supreme authorities like Sophocles and Goethe. The truth is, that among artists we find two broadly differentiated types. The one kind produce their best work when all their faculties are simultaneously excited, and when the generative impulse takes possession of them. They seem to obey the dictates of a power superior to their ordinary faculties. The other kind are always conscious of their methods and their aims; they do nothing, as it were, by accident; they avoid improvisation, and subordinate their creative faculty to reason. The laws of art may be just as fully appreciated by the more instinctive artists, and may have equally determined their choice of form and their calculation of effects; but at the moment of production these rules are thrust into the background, whereas they are continually present to the minds of the deliberate workers. It may be said in passing that this distinction enables us to understand some phrases which the Italians, acutely sensitive to artistic conditions, have reserved for passionate and highly inspired workers; they speak, for instance, of painting a picture or blocking out a statue con furia, when the artist is a Tintoretto or a Michael Angelo. If there is any truth at all in this analysis, we are justified in believing that Æschylus belonged to the former and Sophocles to the latter class of poets, and that this is the secret of the criticism passed by Sophocles upon his predecessor. The account which Æschylus himself gave of his tragedies throws no light upon his method; he is reported to have said that they were "fragments picked up from the mighty feasts of Homer." The value he attached to them is proved by his saying that he dedicated what he wrote to Time.