In the Middle Ages, before people knew much about sanitary science and antiseptics and the like, a great war quickly translated itself into a great pestilence. Then we made advances and discovered Listerian remedies and things, and said: Come now; we shall fight this one; we shall have slaughtered millions lying about as we please, and get no plague out of it; we are wise and mighty, and Karma is a fool to us; we are the children of MODERN CIVILIZATION; what have Nature and its laws to do with us? Our inventions and discoveries have certainly put them out of commission.—And sure enough, the mere foulness of the battlefield, the stench of decay, bred no pest; our Science had circumvented the old methods through which Natural Law (which is only another way of saying Karma) worked; we had cut the physical links, and blocked the material channels through which wrong-doing flowed into its own punishment.—Whereupon Nature, wrathful, withdrew a little; took thought for her astral and inner planes; found new links and channels there; passed through these the causes we had provided, and emptied them out again on the physical plane in the guise of a new thing, Spanish Influenza;—and spread it over three continents, with greater scope and reach than had ever her old-fashioned stench-bred plagues that served her well enough when we were less scientific. Whereof the moral is: He laughs loudest who laughs last; and just now, and for some time to come, the laugh is with Karma. Say until the end of the Maha-Manvantara; until the end of manifested Time. When shall we stop imagining that any possible inventions or discoveries will enable us to circumvent the fundamental laws of Nature? Not the printing-press, nor steam, nor electricity, nor aerial navigation, nor vril itself when we come to it, will serve to keep civilizations alive that have worn themselves out by wrong-doing—or even that have come to old age and the natural time when they must die. But their passings need not be ghastly and disastrous, or anything but honorable and beneficial, if in the prime and vigor of their lifetimes they would learn decently to live.
But to return to our muttons, which is Greece; and now to the literature again:—
After Aeschylus, Sophocles. The former, a Messenger of the Gods, come to cry their message of Karma to the world; and in doing so, incidentally to create a supreme art-form;—the latter, a "good easy soul who lives and lets live, founds no anti-school, upsets no faith."—thus Browning sums him up. A "faultless" artist enamored of his art; in which, thinks he (and most academic critics with him) he can improve something on old Aeschylus; a man bothered with no message; a beautiful youth; a genial companion, well-loved by his friends—and who is not his friend?—all through his long life; twenty times first-prize winner, and never once less than second.—Why, solely on the strength of his Antigone, the Athenians appointed him a strategos in the expedition against Samos; with the thought that one so splendidly victorious in the field of drama, could not fail of victory in mere war. But don't lose hope!—upon an after-thought (perhaps) they appointed Pericles too; who suggested to his poet-colleague that though master of them all in his own line, he had better on the whole leave the sordid details of command to himself, Pericles, who had more experience of that sort. What more shall we say of Sophocles?—A charming brilliant fellow in his cups—of which, as of some other more questionable pleasures, report is he was too fond; a man worshiped during his life, and on his death made a hero with semi-divine honors;—does that sound like the story of a Messenger of the Gods?
He was born at Colonos in Attica, in 496; of his hundred or so of dramas, seven come down to us. His age saw in him the very ideal of a tragic poet; Aristotle thought so too; so did the Alexandrian critics, and most moderns with them. "Indeed," says Mahaffy, "it is no unusual practice to exhibit the defects of both Aeschylus and Euripides by comparison with their more successful rival." Without trying to give you conclusions of my own, I shall read you a longish passage from Gilbert Murray, who is not only a great Greek scholar, but a fine critic as well, and a poet with the best translations we have of Greek tragedy to his credit; he has made Euripides read like good English poetry. Comparing the Choephori of Aeschylus, the second play in the Oreseian Trilogy, with the Electra of Sophocles, which deals with the same matter, he says:
"Aeschylus… had felt vividly the horror of his plot; he carries his characters to the deed of blood on a storm of confused, torturing, half-religious emotion; the climax is of course, the mother-murder, and Orestes falls into madness after it. In the Electra this element is practically ignored. Electra has no qualms; Orestes shows no signs of madness; the climax is formed not by the culminating horror, the matricide, but by the hardest bit of work, the slaying of Aegisthos! Aeschylus has kept Electra and Clytemnestra apart; here we see them freely in the hard unloveliness of their daily wrangles. Above all, in place of the cry of bewilderment that closes the Choephori—'What is the end of all this spilling of blood for blood?'—the Electra closes with an expression of entire satisfaction… Aeschylus takes the old bloody saga in an earnest and troubled spirit, very different from Homer's, but quite as grand. His Orestes speaks and feels as Aechylus himself would… Sophocles… takes the saga exactly as he finds it. He knows that those ancient chiefs did not trouble about their consciences; they killed in the fine old ruthless way. He does not try to make them real to himself at the cost of making them false to the spirit of the epos…
"The various bits of criticism ascribed to him—'I draw men as they ought to be drawn; Euripides draws them as they are'; 'Aeschylus did the right thing, but without knowing it'—all imply the academic standpoint… Even his exquisite diction, which is such a marked advance on the stiff magnificence of his predecessor, betrays the lesser man in the greater artist. Aeschylus's superhuman speech seems like natural superhuman speech. It is just the language that Prometheus would talk, that an ideal Agamemnon or Atossa might talk in the great moments. But neither Prometheus nor Oedipus nor Electra, nor anyone but an Attic poet of the highest culture, would talk as Sophocles makes them. It is this which has established Sophocles as the perfect model, not only for Aristotle, but in general for critics and grammarians; while the poets have been left to admire Aeschylus, who 'wrote in a state of intoxication,' and Euripedes, who broke himself against the bars of life and poetry."
You must, of course, always allow for a personal equation in the viewpoint of any critic: you must here weight the "natural superhuman diction" against the "stiff magnificence" Professor Murray attributes to Aeschylus; and get a wise and general view of your own. What I want you to see clearly is, the descent of the influx from plane to plane, as shown in these two tragedians. The aim of the first is to express a spiritual message, grand thought. That of the second is to produce a work of flawless beauty, without regard to its spiritual import. What was to Aeschylus a secondary object; the purely artistic—was to Sophocles the whole thing. Aeschylus was capable of wonderful psychological insight. Clytemnestra's speech to the Chorus, just before Agamemnon's return, is a perfect marvel in that way. But the tremendous movement, the August impersonal atmosphere as
"…. gorgeous Tragedy In sceptered pall comes sweeping by."
—divests it of the personal, and robes it in a universal symbolic significance: because he has built like a titan, you do not at first glance note that he has labored like a goldsmith, as someone has said. But in Sophocles the goldsmithry is plain to see. His character-painting is exquisite: pathetic often; just and beautiful almost always. I put in the almost in view of that about the "hard unloveliness" of Electra's "daily wrangles" with her mother. The mantle of the religious Egyptians had fallen on Aeschylus: but Sophocles' garb was the true fashionable Athenian chiton of his day. He was personal, where the other had been impersonal; faultless, where the other had been sublime; conventionally orthodox, where through Aeschylus had surged the super-credal spirit of universal prophecy.
And then we come to third of the trio: Euripides, born in 480. "He was," says Professor Murray, "essentially representative of his age, yet apparently in hostility to it; almost a failure of the stage—he won only four prizes in fifty years of production— yet far the most celebrated poet in Greece." Athens hated, jeered at, and flouted him just as much as she honored and adored Sophocles; yet you know what happened to those Athenian captives at Syracuse who could recite Euripides. Where, in later Greek writings, we come on quotations from the other two once or twice, we come on quotations from Euripides dozens of times. The very fact that eighteen of his plays survive, to seven each of Aeschylus' and Sophocles', is proof of his larger and longer popularity.