In the Agamemnon 'the old men left-at-home' form the Chorus. There is enough dramatic power in this one idea to carry a play. It is so natural: the old men are on the spot; they are interested; they are the essence of the story, and yet external to it. These old men are, indeed, the archetype of all choruses—a collection of by-standers, a sort of little dummy audience, intended to steer the great, real audience into a comprehension of the play.
The Greek dramatist found this very useful machine, the Chorus, at his elbow; but he was, on the other hand, greatly controlled by it. It had ways of its own: it inherited dramatic necessities. The element of convention and of theatrical usage is so very predominant in the handling of Greek choruses by the poets, that we have in chorus-work something that may be regarded almost as a constant quality. By studying choruses one can arrive at an idea of the craft of Greek play-writing—one can even separate the conventional from the personal to some extent.
The Greek Chorus has no mind of its own; it merely gives echo to the last dramatic thought. It goes forward and back, contradicts itself, sympathizes with all parties or none, and lives in a limbo. Its real function is to represent the slow-minded man in the audience. It does what he does, it interjects questions and doubts, it delays the plot and indulges in the proper emotions during the pauses. These functions are quite limited, and were completely understood in Greek times; so much so, that in the typical stock tragedy of the Æschylean school certain saws, maxims, and reflections appear over and over again. One of them, of course, was, 'See how the will of the gods works out in unexpected ways.' Another, 'Let us be pious, and reverence something that is perhaps behind the gods themselves.' Another, 'This is all very extraordinary: let us hope for the best.' Another, 'Our feelings about right and wrong must somehow be divine; traditional morality, traditional piety, are somehow right.'
Precisely the same reflections are often put in the mouths of the subordinate characters, and for precisely the same purpose. 'Oh, may the quiet life be mine! Give me neither poverty nor riches: for the destinies of the great are ever uncertain.' 'Temptation leads to insolence, and insolence to destruction'; and so forth. Such reflections serve the same purpose, by whomever they are uttered. They underscore the moral of the story and assure the spectator that he has not missed the point.
As religious tragedy broadened into political and romantic tragedy, the Chorus gained a certain freedom in what might be called its interjectional duty,—its duty, that is to say, of helping the plot along by proper questions, and so forth. It gained also a Protean freedom in its emotional interpretations during pauses. The playwrights apparently discovered that by the use of music and dancing, the most subtle and delicate, nay, the most whimsical varieties of lyrical mood could be conveyed to great audiences. In spite of this license, however, the old duties of the Chorus as guardians of conservative morality remained unchanged; and the stock phrases of exhortation and warning remained de rigueur in the expectation of the audience. Their meaning had become so well known that, by the time of Æschylus, they were expressed in algebraic terms.
No man could to-day unravel a Chorus of Æschylus if only one such Chorus existed. The truncated phrases and elliptical thoughts are clear, to us, because we have learned their meaning through reiteration, and because they always mean the same thing. The poet has a license to provide the Chorus with dark sayings,—dark in form, but simple in import. It was, indeed, his duty to give these phrases an oracular character. In the course of time such phrases became the terror of the copyists. Obscure passages became corrupt in process of transcription; and thus we have inherited a whole class of choral wisdom which we understand well enough (just as the top gallery understood it well enough) to help us in our enjoyment of the play. The obscurity, and perhaps even some part of what we call 'corruption,' are here a part of the stage convention.
Now with regard to the Bacchantes—the scheme of having Mænads for a Chorus gave splendid promise of scenic effect; and the fact that, as a logical consequence, these ladies would have to give utterance to the usual maxims of piety, mixed in with the rhapsodies of their professional madness, did not daunt Euripides. He simply makes the Chorus do the usual chorus work, without burdening his mind about character-drawing. Thus the Mænads, at moments when they are not pretending to be Mænads, and are not singing, 'Away to the mountains, O the foot of the stag,' and so on, are obliged to turn the other cheek, and pretend to be interested by-standers—old gaffers, wagging their beards, and quoting the book of Proverbs. The transition from one mood to the other is done in a stroke of lightning, and seems to be independent of the music. That is, it seems to make no difference, so long as the musical schemes are filled out, whether the ladies are singing, 'On with the dance, let joy be unconfined!' or, 'True wisdom differs from sophistry, and consists in avoiding subjects that are beyond mortal comprehension.' All such discrepancies would, no doubt, have been explained if we possessed the music; but the music is lost. It seems, at any rate, certain that the grand public was not expected to understand the word-for-word meaning of choruses; hence their license to be obscure. We get the same impression from the jibes of Aristophanes, whose ridicule of the pompous obscurity of Æschylus makes us suspect that the audiences could not follow the grammar in the lofty parts of the tragedy. They accepted the drum-roll of horror, and understood the larger grammar of tragedy, much as we are now forced to do in reading the plays.
It would seem that by following the technique of tragedy, and by giving no thought to small absurdities, Euripides got a double effect out of his Mænads and no one observed that anything was wrong. In one place he resorts to a dramatic device, which was perhaps well known in his day, namely, the 'conversion' of a bystander. After the First Messenger has given the great description of Dionysus's doings in the mountains, the Chorus, or one of them, with overpowering yet controlled emotion, steps forward and says, 'I tremble to speak free words in the presence of my King; yet nevertheless be it said: Dionysus is no less a god than the greatest of them!' This reference to the duty of a subject is probably copied from a case where the Chorus was made up of local bystanders. In the mouth of a Mænad the proclamation is logically ridiculous; yet so strange are the laws of what 'goes' on the stage that it may have been effective even here.
Some of the choruses in the Bacchantes are miracles of poetic beauty, of savage passion, of liquid power. It is hard to say exactly what they are, but they are wonderful. And behind all, there gleams from the whole play a sophistication as deep as the Ægean.