The downtrend of the cycle awaits you—the other half—just as the runner in the foot-races to win, must round the pillar at the far end of the course, and return to the starting-place.—That is among the warnings Aeschylus spoke in the Agamemnon to an Athens that was barefacedly conquering and enslaving the Isles of Greece to no end but her own wealth and power and glory. The obvious reference is of course to the conquerors of Troy.
I have spoken of this Oresteian Trilogy as his Hamlet; with the Prometheus Bound—another tremendous Soul-Symbol—it is what puts him in equal rank with the four supreme Masters of later Western Literature. I suppose it is pretty certain that Shakespeare knew nothing of him, and had never heard of the plot of his Agamemnon. But look here:—
There was one Hamlet King of Denmark, absent from control of his kingdom because sleeping within his orchard (his custom always of an afternoon). And there was one Agamemnon King of Men, absent from control of his kingdom because leading those same Men at the siege of Troy. Hamlet had a wife Gertrude; Agamemnon had a wife Clytemnestra. Hamlet had a brother Claudius; who became the lover of Gertrude. Agamemnon had a cousin Aegisthos, who became the paramour of Clytemnestra. Claudius murdered Hamlet, and thereby came by his throne and queen. Clytemnestra and Aegisthos murdered Agamemnon, and Aegisthos thereby became possessed of his throne and queen. Hamlet and Gertrude had a son Hamlet, who avenged his father's murder. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had a son Orestes, who avenged his father's murder.
There, however, the parallel ends. Shakespeare had to paint the human soul at a certain stage of its evolution: the 'moment of choice,' the entering on the path: and brought all his genius to bear on revealing that. He had, here, to teach Karma only incidentally; in Macbeth, when the voice cried 'Sleep no more!' he is more Aeschylean in spirit. That dreadful voice rings through Aeschylus; who was altogether obsessed with the majesty and awfulness of Karma. It is what he cried to Athens then, and to all ages since, reiterating Karma with terrible sleep-forbidding insistency from dark heights.—I have quoted the wonderful line in which Browning, using similes borrowed from Aeschylus himself, sums up the effect of his style:
'Aeschylus' bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood,'
which compensates for the more than Greek—unintelligibility of Browning's version of the Agamemnon: it gives you some color, some adumbration of the being and import of the man. How shall we compare him with those others, his great compeers on the Mountain of Song? Shakespeare—as I think—throned upon a peak where are storms often, but where the sun shines mostly; surveying all this life, and with an eye to the eternal behind: Dante—a prophet, stern, proud, glad and sorrowful; ever in a great pride of pain or agony of bliss; surveying the life without,—only to correlate it with and interpret it by the vaster life within that he knew better;—this Universe for him but the crust and excoriata of the Universe of the Soul. Milton—a Titan Soul hurled down from heaven, struggling with all chaos and the deep to enunciate—just to proclaim and put on everlasting record— those two profound significant words, Titan and Soul, for a memorial to Man of the real nature of Man. Aeschylus—the barking of an eagle—of Zeus the Thunderer's own eagle out of ominous skies above the mountains: a thing unseen as Karma, mysterious and mighty as Fate, as Disaster, as the final Triumph of the Soul; sublime as death; a throat of bronze, superhumanly impersonal; a far metallic clangor of sound, hoarse or harsh, perhaps, if your delicate ears must call him so; but grand; immeasurably grand; majestically, ominously and terribly grand;— ancestral voices prophesying war, and doom, and all dark tremendous destinies;—and yet he too with serenity and the Prophecy of Peace and bliss for his last word to us: he will not leave his avenging Erinyes until by Pallas' wand and will they are transformed into Eumenides, bringers of good fortune.
Something like that, perhaps, is the impression Aeschylus leaves on the minds of those who know him. They bear testimony to the fact that, however grand his style—like a Milton Carlylized in poetry—thought still seems to overtop it and to be struggling for expression through a vehicle less than itself.
Says Lytton, not unwisely perhaps: "His genius is so near the verge of bombast, that to approach his sublime is to rush into the ridiculous"; and he goes on to say that you might find the nearest echo of his diction in Shelley's Prometheus; but of his diction alone; for "his power is in concentration—that of Shelley in diffuseness." "The intellectuality of Shelley," he says, "destroyed; that of Aeschylus only increased his command over the passions. The interest he excites is startling, terrible, intense." Browning tried to bring over the style; but left the thought, in an English Double-Dutched, far remoter than he found it from our understanding. The thought demands in English a vehicle crystal-clear; but Aeschylus in the Greek is not crystal-clear: so close-packed and vast are the ideas that there are lines on lines of which the best scholars can only conjecture the meaning.—In all this criticism, let me say, one is but saying what has been said before; echoing Professor Mahaffy; echoing Professor Gilbert Murray; but there is a need to give you the best picture possible of this man speaking from the eternal.—Unless Milton and Carlyle had co-operated to make it, I think, any translation of the Agamemnon—which so many have tried to translate—would be fatiguing and a great bore to read. It may not be amiss to quote three lines from George Peel's David and Bethsabe, which have been often called Aeschylean in audacity:—
"At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt,
And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings,
Sit ever burning on his hateful wings;"
His—the thunder's—fair spouse is the lightning. Imagine images as swift, vivid and daring as that, hurled and flashed out in language terse, sudden, lofty—and you may get an idea of what this eagle's bark was like. And the word that came rasping and resounding on it out of storm-skies high over Olympus, for Athens then and the world since to hear, was KARMA.