The three great dramatists in artistic sequence are Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. These were all alive together, but Aeschylus was old when Euripides was young. The appearance of all these in one epoch is exactly paralleled by the cluster of superlative dramatists in the Elizabethan age or in the France of Louis XIV. Of Sophocles it has been said that he represented men as they ought to be, and of Euripides that he represented them as they were. The dictum is hardly true, and, if it were, it must be noted that, whereas to “hold the mirror up to nature” is as much the function of Greek tragedy as of English, it is no function of Greek drama to be a literal copy of literal everyday human experience. In Aeschylus all is in the grand style of an awe-inspiring simplicity. Take his Prometheus Bound. We have a majestic Titan figure bound to a desolate rock, there to remain in punishment for an offence against the law of Zeus. He had bestowed fire and other boons on mortal men. Therefore Zeus pinioned him on Caucasus for tens of thousands of years. In one way, and one only, could he gain his freedom—by disclosing to Zeus a certain secret of fate. But Prometheus would not repent of having exercised his benevolent freewill against the decree of Heaven. He gloried in his action; he refused to deliver up the secret. Now during the whole play the figure of Prometheus does not move: he is fixed fast. There is no action on his part, nothing but speech. Different gods, demigods, and a mortal visit him, condole with him, advise him, or threaten him. He remains firm to the end, the spectacle of an utterly resolute heart rebelling against fate.
It is not hard to recognize in English literature some of the characters to which this Prometheus has served as prototype. There is Milton’s Satan, who is distinctly modelled on the Titan. Byron acknowledges that all his rebellious spirits, Cain, Manfred, and their like, are echoes of the same character. Shelley wrote a Prometheus Unbound for sequel. Keats’s Hyperion shows the same influence. Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon is throughout inspired by the conception of Aeschylus.
Ancient drama has much attracted the modern poet. The Agamemnon of Aeschylus has been translated by Browning, far more roughly—not to say grotesquely—in style than it deserves, but with the Greek spirit in no small measure retained. The same writer has translated the Alcestis of Euripides in the work known as Balaustion’s Adventure.
But to the English stage Greek tragedies are not suited. Our theatre is not religious, nor national. But in France and Italy Greek plays have found a more congenial soil. Corneille and Racine in France, Alfieri in Italy, have sought to mould their dramas upon Greek lines, though, truth to tell, they much more closely suggest the rhetorical constructions of the Latins. The only deliberate attempt to compose in English directly on the Grecian model is Milton’s Samson Agonistes, a work in which admirable poetry does not atone for a certain coldness and formality intolerable in drama, whether meant for Greece or for England. Yet inasmuch as the Italian drama was largely instrumental in developing the English from its crude and vulgar antecedents, and as Italian drama was in its turn evoked by the dramatic examples of Greece, we can even here, despite all unlikenesses, distinctly affiliate the main principles of our own stage-pieces to those of ancient Athens. We cannot, indeed, maintain that without Athens we should have had no drama; we can only assert that our greatest drama, as we have it, in its poetical dignity and its technical architecture, would hardly have been. It might have been a prose drama, and one of very different conception and ideals. But it is what it is because it took from Greece that which suited its purpose, while it left to Greece those elements which belong to so different a theatre.
It has been described how Greek tragic drama arose from the choruses singing round the altar of Dionysus. Greek comedy springs from the same source. There were two sides to a Greek festival, as there are two sides to Christmas Day. The serious part of the festivity developed serious poetry and serious action. The light, sportive, and satirical part developed humorous verse and humorous action. It is easy to see how both dramatic kinds would originate from these two different aspects of the feast. From beginnings as rude as those of tragedy was developed the comedy of Aristophanes or of Menander, which in its turn, begat that of Plautus and Terence at Rome, and thence of Shakespeare’s predecessors in England and of Molière in France. Even the comic opera of to-day bears a wonderfully close resemblance to plays of Aristophanes, with whom occur almost the same bizarre situations and humours as in Gilbert’s very modern eccentricities.
Comedy, like tragedy, had its chorus, chanting appropriate odes during the intervals of acting. And be it noted that the Greek drama, whether tragic or comic, was literary. It bears to be read as much as to be acted; it is a work of conscientious art. In tragedy the writing is pure poetry. In comedy it is humour and wit, biting, sparkling, often coarse and very personal, but always full of life. There was some defence for personality. Comedy, like tragedy, served to give various lessons to the Athenians. Greece possessed no newspapers, and in their place the comic stage served even more than now to criticize fads, to chastise political and private misdoings. So long as it was what is called the “Old Comedy” of Aristophanes it availed itself only too fully of these licences. But when its attacks on politics or private persons became intolerable, its wings were clipped by law, and in the “New Comedy” of Menander we find another tone, the tone of Molière or of Ben Jonson, the treatment of social types, the comedy of domestic intrigue. Of the whims of the “Old Comedy” the following may serve as a specimen. In the Birds of Aristophanes two enterprising Athenians persuade the birds to build a city in the clouds—“Cloud-cuckoo-town” it is called—by which the ungrateful gods are to be cut off from men, and so forced to come to terms. This is the central idea. Twenty-four persons, equipped as different birds, form the chorus, and give the name to the piece. The central conception, however, is but a peg on which to hang attacks upon the follies of the day, and particularly follies in contemporary politics. Neither parties nor men are spared. Nevertheless the piece is always comedy; it cultivates “the laughable”; it is never mere diatribe.
One other kind of ancient poetry, and a delightful kind as we see it in Greece, is the pastoral idyll of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus. In English literature the word “pastoral” at once suggests poor triviality, the rather mawkish and always artificial eclogues of Pope or the Shepheard’s Calender of Spenser. But, though the conception of these works was ultimately borrowed from Greek through the Latin medium of Virgil, or the Italian medium of Sannazaro, they lack precisely those elements which make the Greek pastoral idyll a thing of beauty and a joy for ever. When Theocritus, about 270 B.C., wrote in Alexandria or elsewhere his “Idylls” or (“little pictures”), he was portraying a life among Sicilian or Coan shepherds which possessed a large proportion of truth and naturalness. At least it is of real shepherds that he writes, idealizing, perhaps, their Arcadian environment of sunshine and simplicity, but nevertheless presenting a life easily conceivable among entirely possible rustics. He imaged a rural scene, placed in it a befitting action or situation, and called his work “a little picture.” But when Virgil imitated him at Rome, the Corydons and Damoetases whom he introduces are hardly shepherds of reality. Their talk tends to be artificial and literary. Shepherds did not pipe and contend in alternate minstrelsy on the Italian farms as Greek shepherds had done, however rudely, in Cos or Sicily. Moreover Virgil wrote with an arrière pensée. He was thinking of the society of his time, and more or less representing that society under the guise of obviously theatrical shepherds. In Spenser’s Shepheard’s Calender we no longer recognize any pretence at reality. The idea of merry witty shepherds piping in sylvan scenes of sunlit Sicily is natural enough; but the notion of the smock-frocked rustic of rainy Britain vying in song with another smock-frocked rustic concerning his Amaryllis or his Chloe is not a little ludicrous. Especially is this so when we know that Colin Clout, Cuddie, Hobbinol, and the other swains, are talking moral wisdom, and are nothing but Spenser’s friends or contemporary celebrities with shepherds’ crooks for poetic “properties.”
Distinguished, however, from pastoral poetry pure and simple, as seen in Pope and Spenser, there is a more important form of creation by these Alexandrian poets, which finds its way into English literature. It is from Theocritus and his school that Milton’s Lycidas is drawn, and it is from Lycidas that we get Shelley’s Adonais and Matthew Arnold’s Thyrsis. Here are two quite unimportant passages, the comparison of which will show at once how closely a great English poet may occasionally copy an ancient. Says Theocritus, as translated by Calverley:
The voice of Thyrsis: Etna’s Thyrsis I.
Where were ye, Nymphs, oh where, while Daphnis pined?