The women of Æschylus are much greater figures. Clytemnestra is colossal: Cassandra, Electra and Io are all conceived majestically. Unlike the Epic women, they are capable of strenuous action: strong passions sway them, and they are much concerned with the great issues of life. We know little or nothing about their appearance, and it does not seem to matter. They do not live in our mental vision pictorially, in soft, warm tints; but remotely grand, they appeal to a more austere sense of wonder, awe and reverence. Surrounded by an atmosphere of myth, and sharing in the elevation of the poet’s spirit, they seem to be creatures of an older and a bigger world.
There is indeed one woman in the Æschylean Drama, Orestes’ nurse, who is of ordinary stature and might belong to any age. But she is of minor importance in the story, and does not move on the heroic plane. She is therefore beyond the range of that sublimating power of the poetic spirit which magnified the heroes and heroines to immense proportions. And as she stands in the clear daylight outside the enchanted circle she is just an old grey woman taken straight out of common life. But for that very reason there is a hearty, homely breath about her which is very refreshing. She is but a nurse: she is quaint and querulous in her talk, inept, wordy and reminiscent; and peevishly loyal. Yet in her very weakness and foolishness she is precious, for is she not a flash from the eyes of the Comic Spirit, naïvely unconscious of its august surroundings? We feel that we can actually see and hear her, as she gabbles about Orestes’ babyhood and how she tended him; being nurse, cook, foster-mother and washerwoman all combined. But she is unique among Æschylean women, and when we turn to look again on the figures of his heroines, a thought is suggested by the extreme contrast. Here is creative genius so strong that it has evoked on the one hand the grandeur of a Clytemnestra; and on the other, the biting reality of this old slave. But there does not seem to have been an equivalent artistic power which, controlling the fervid idealism and combining it with his keen insight, would have produced types more fully and completely human.
Such types we find first when we come to the Drama of Sophocles. With Æschylus the ruling passion had been spiritual fervour. In Sophocles the artist reigned paramount. All the advance which his drama made, in plot, incident and character-building, was in the direction of a more perfect art. And although there was some inevitable loss—as for instance the curtailment of the lyrics by modifying the part of the Chorus; and their lower poetic flight—on the whole the gain is very great. In the matter of characterization, with which we are chiefly concerned, the change is one which brings us out of the region of demi-gods into the world of men and women.
When we say that the persons of Sophocles’s drama are real people, that is not to say that they are ‘realistic’ in the narrow sense of the word which conveys only what is average and actual. But it does mean that with all their splendour and dignity and fine achievement they are subject to our common humanity. They are not immune from the defects of their virtues. The passions which have led them to great deeds are potent agents of their downfall. It is the flaw within which helps to betray them.
For this reason, and also because the poet shows his characters moving in intimate human relationships, the women of Sophocles are intensely living creatures. Electra in her conflict with Chrysothomis, and Antigone with Ismene, are of the stuff of life; and the situations thus created are pure drama. Here two great natures clash. Closely bound by the ties of blood and affection, but at the opposite poles of temperament, the struggle between them is all the more bitter from the intimacy of their relationship. Both claim our esteem and both are sincerely confident in the purity of their intentions. But each mistrusts the other, believing her to be fatally misguided or wilfully blind. It is by this faculty of seeing all sides of an issue, or, as Matthew Arnold expressed it, “to see life steadily and see it whole,” that Sophocles has heightened and deepened the dramatic values of a story. Out of that, too, he has made Jocasta, with all her state and despite the unnatural horror with which she is touched, a pitiable figure.
Here again two noble natures, near and very dear to each other, are brought into conflict. In this case, however, there is an added element of tragic irony which increases the dramatic power threefold. For we know, as we watch the tender comradeship of Œdipus and Jocasta, that there is this sinister thing in the background, ready to flame out at any instant and make them loathsome in each other’s eyes. And the moment when the shameful truth is revealed, literally dragged to light by Œdipus to his own undoing, is perhaps the most awful in Greek tragedy.
The story belongs to the Theban cycle, of which we have already heard. It is older than Homer, who calls Jocasta Epicasta; and it had many variants. In the Eleventh Book of the Odyssey there is the quaint epitome of it which the hero gives when he is describing his visit to the World of the Dead. Among the shades which throng there he sees Jocasta.
“And then beheld I Epicasta fair,
Oedipus’ mother, her who unaware
Did a strange deed through ignorance of mind,