‘The tragic style of Æschylus is grand, severe, and not unfrequently hard. In the style of Sophocles, we observe the most complete proportion and harmonious sweetness. The style of Euripides is soft and luxuriant: Extravagant in his easy fulness, he sacrifices the general effect to brilliant passages.
‘Æschylus is to be considered as the creator of Tragedy, which sprung from him completely armed, like Pallas from the head of Jupiter. He clothed it in a state of suitable dignity, and gave it an appropriate place of exhibition. He was the inventor of scenic pomp; and not only instructed the chorus in singing and dancing, but appeared himself in the character of a player. He was the first who gave development to the dialogue, and limits to the lyrical part of the tragedy, which still however occupies too much space in his pieces. He draws his characters with a few bold and strongly marked features. The plans are simple in the extreme. He did not understand the art of enriching and varying an action, and dividing its development and catastrophe into parts, bearing a due proportion to each other. Hence his action often stands still; and this circumstance becomes still more apparent, from the undue extension of his choral songs. But all his poetry betrays a sublime and serious mind. Terror is his element, and not the softer affections: he holds up the head of Medusa to his astonished spectators. His manner of treating Fate is austere in the extreme; he suspends it over the heads of mortals in all its gloomy majesty. The Cothurnus of Æschylus has, as it were, an iron weight; gigantic figures alone stalk before our eyes. It seems as if it required an effort in him to condescend to paint mere men to us: he abounds most in the representation of gods, and seems to dwell with particular delight in exhibiting the Titans, those ancient gods who typify the dark powers of primitive nature, and who had long been driven into Tartarus, beneath a better regulated world. He endeavours to swell out his language to a gigantic sublimity, corresponding with the standard of his characters. Hence he abounds in harsh combinations and overstrained epithets; and the lyrical parts of his pieces are often obscure in the extreme, from the involved nature of the construction. He resembles Dante and Shakespeare in the very singular cast of his images and expressions. These images are nowise deficient in the terrible graces, which almost all the writers of antiquity celebrate in Æschylus. He flourished in the very first vigour of the Grecian freedom; was an eyewitness of the overthrow and annihilation of the Persian hosts under Darius and Xerxes; and, in one of his pieces—the Persians—describes in the most vivid and glowing colours the battle of Salamis.’ p. 94.
Such is the general account of Æschylus given by our author. He then proceeds to give a distinct sketch of each of his tragedies. This, we will acknowledge, appears to us considerably too rapturous and too long;—but we must give our readers a specimen of what is perhaps the most elaborate, if not the most impressive part of the whole publication. We shall select his account of the Eumenides or Furies, the most terrible of all this poet’s compositions.
‘The fable of the Eumenides is the justification and absolution of Orestes from his bloody crime, the murder of Clytemnestra his mother. It is a trial, but a trial where the gods are accusers and defenders and judges; and the manner in which the subject is treated, corresponds with its majesty and importance. The scene itself brought before the eyes of the Greeks the highest objects of veneration which were known to them. It opens before the celebrated temple at Delphi, which occupies the back-ground. The aged Pythia enters in sacerdotal pomp, addresses her prayers to the gods who preside over the oracle, harangues the assembled people, and goes into the temple to seat herself on the tripod. She returns full of consternation, and describes what she has seen in the temple; a man stained with blood, supplicating protection, surrounded by sleeping women with serpent hair. She then makes her exit by the same entrance. Apollo now appears with Orestes in his traveller’s garb, and a sword and olive branch in his hands. He promises him his farther protection, commands him to fly to Athens, and recommends him to the care of the present but invisible Mercury, to whom travellers, and especially those who were under the necessity of concealing their journey, were usually consigned. Orestes goes off at the side allotted to strangers; Apollo re-enters the temple, which remains open, and the Furies are seen in the interior sleeping on their seats. Clytemnestra now ascends through the orchestra, and appears on the stage. We are not to suppose her a haggard skeleton, but a figure with the appearance of life, though paler, still bearing her wounds in her breast, and shrouded in ethereal-coloured vestments. She calls repeatedly to the Furies in the language of vehement reproach; and then disappears. The Furies awake; and when they no longer find Orestes, they dance in wild commotion round the stage during the choral song. Apollo returns from the temple, and expels them from his sanctuary as profanatory beings. We may here suppose him appearing with the sublime displeasure of the Apollo of the Vatican, with bow and quiver, or clothed in his sacred tunic and chlamys. The scene now changes; but the back-ground probably remained unchanged, and had now to represent the temple of Minerva on the hill of Mars; and the lateral decorations would be converted into Athens and the surrounding landscape. Orestes comes as from another land, and embraces as a suppliant the statue of Pallas placed before the temple. The chorus (who were clothed in black, with purple girdles, and serpents in their hair), follow him on foot to this place, but remain throughout the rest of the piece beneath in the orchestra. The Furies had at first exhibited the rage of beasts of prey at the escape of their victim; but they now sing with tranquil dignity their high and terrible office among mortals, claim the head of Orestes as forfeited to them, and consecrate it with mysterious charms of endless pain. Pallas, the warlike virgin, appears in a chariot and four at the intercession of the suppliant. She listens with calm dignity to the mutual complaints of Orestes and his adversaries, and finally undertakes the office of umpire at the solicitation of the two parties. The assembled judges take their seats on the steps of the temple; the herald commands silence among the people by sound of trumpet, as at an actual tribunal. Apollo advances to advocate the cause of the youth; the Furies in vain oppose his interference; and the arguments for and against the deed are gone through in short speeches. The judges throw their calculi into the urn; Pallas throws in a white one; all are wrought up to the highest pitch of expectation; Orestes calls out, full of anguish, to his protector: “O Phœbus Apollo, how is the cause decided?”—The Furies on the other hand, exclaim—“O Black Night, mother of all things, dost thou behold this?” In the enumeration of the black and white pebbles, they are found equal in number, and the accused is therefore declared by Pallas acquitted of the charge. He breaks out into joyful expressions of thanks, while the Furies declaim against the arrogance of the younger gods, who take such liberties with the race of Titan. Pallas bears their rage with equanimity; addresses them in the language of kindness, and even of veneration; and these beings, so untractable in their general disposition, are unable to withstand the power of her mild and convincing eloquence. They promise to bless the land over which she has dominion; while Pallas assigns them a sanctuary in the Attic territory, where they are to be called the Eumenides, that is, the Benevolent. The whole ends with a solemn procession round the theatre, with songs of invocation; while bands of children, women, and old men, in purple robes and with torches in their hands, accompany the Furies in their exit.’ p. 104.
The situation of Orestes at the opening of this tragedy, with the Furies lying asleep on the floor, like aged women, with serpent hair, is perhaps the most terrible that can be conceived. But yet, in this situation, dreadful as it is—the sense of power; the representation of preternatural forms; the sacredness of the place; the momentary suspense of the action; the death like stillness; the expectation of what is to come, subdue the spirit to a tone of awful tranquillity, and, from the depth of despair, produce a lofty grandeur and collectedness of mind.
If this extraordinary play be the most terrible of Æschylus’s works, the Chained Prometheus is the grandest. It is less a tragedy than an ode. It does not describe a series of actions, but a succession of visions. Prometheus, chained to a rock on the verge of the world, holds parley with the original powers and oldest forms of Nature, with Strength and Violence, and Oceanus and the race of the Titans. Compared with the personages introduced in this poem, Jupiter and Mercury, and the rest of that class, appear mere modern deities; we are thrown back into the first rude chaos of Nature, where the universe itself seems to rock like the sea, and the empire of heaven was not yet fixed.
‘Prometheus,’ says our author, ‘is an image of human nature itself; endowed with a miserable foresight, and bound down to a narrow existence, without an ally, and with nothing to oppose to the combined and inexorable powers of Nature, but an unshaken will, and the consciousness of elevated claims. The other poems of the Greek tragedians are single tragedies; but this may be called tragedy itself; its purest spirit is revealed with all the overpowering influence of its first unmitigated austerity.’
We agree with M. Schlegel, when he says, that ‘there is little external action in this piece: Prometheus merely suffers and resolves from the beginning to the end.’ But we cannot assent to his assertion, that ‘the poet has contrived, in a masterly manner, to introduce variety into that which was in itself determinate.’ All that is fine in it, is the abstract conception of the characters: The story is as uninteresting, as it is inartificial and improbable.
The Seven before Thebes has also a very imperfect dramatic form. It is for the most part only a narrative or descriptive dialogue passing between two persons, the King and the Messenger. ‘The description of the attack with which the city is threatened,’ says our critic, ‘and of the seven leaders who have sworn its destruction, and who display their arrogance in the symbols borne on their shields, is an epic subject, clothed in the pomp of tragedy.’ The Agamemnon and Electra are the two tragedies of Æschylus, which approach the nearest to the perfection of the dramatic form, and which will bear an immediate comparison with those of Sophocles on the same subjects. M. Schlegel has drawn a detailed and very admirable parallel between the two poets. Sophocles, he observes, is the more elegant painter of outward forms and manners; but Æschylus catches most of the enthusiasm of the passion he describes, and communicates to the reader the lofty impulses of his own mind. In giving a poetical colouring to objects from the suggestions of his own genius—in describing not so much things themselves, as the impression which they make on the imagination in a state of strong excitement, he more nearly resembles some of the modern poets, than any of his countrymen. The magnificent opening of the Agamemnon, in which the watchman describes the appearance of the fires for which he had watched ten long years, as the signal of the destruction of Troy, might be cited as an instance of that rich and varied style, which gives something over the bare description of the subject, and luxuriates in the display of its own powers. The Ajax of Sophocles comes the nearest to the general style of Æschylus, both in the nakedness of the subject, and the poetical interest given to the character.
The account of Sophocles, which is next in order, is one of the most finished and interesting parts of this work: though it is disfigured by one extraordinary piece of rhodomontade, too characteristic to be omitted. After observing that Sophocles lived to be upwards of ninety years of age, our philosophical German breaks out into the following mystic strain.