‘It would seem as if the Gods, in return for his dedicating himself at an early age to Bacchus as the giver of all joy, and the author of the cultivation of the human race, by the representation of tragical dramas for his festivals, had wished to confer immortality on him, so long did they delay the hour of his death; but, as this was impossible, they extinguished his life at least as gently as possible, that he might imperceptibly change one immortality for another—the long duration of his earthly existence for an imperishable name.’ p. 117.
We cannot afford to enter into the detailed critique which M. Schlegel has here offered upon the several plays of this celebrated author. The following passage exhibits a more summary view of them. After mentioning the native sweetness for which he was so celebrated among his contemporaries, he observes—
‘Whoever is thoroughly imbued with the feeling of this property, may flatter himself that a sense for ancient art has arisen within him: for the lovers of the affected sentimentality of the present day would, both in the representation of bodily sufferings, and in the language and economy of the tragedies of Sophocles, find much of an insupportable austerity. When we consider the great fertility of Sophocles, for, according to some, he wrote a hundred and thirty pieces, and eighty according to the most moderate account, we cannot help wondering that seven only should have come down to us. Chance, however, has so far favoured us, that, in these seven pieces, we find several which were held by the ancients as his greatest works, Antigone, for example, Electra, and the two Œdipuses; and these have also come down to us tolerably free from mutilation and corruption in the text. The first Œdipus and Philoctetes have been generally, without any good reason, preferred to all the others by the modern critics: the first, on account of the artifice of the plot, in which the dreadful catastrophe, powerfully calculated to excite our curiosity (a rare case in the Greek tragedies), is brought about inevitably, by a succession of causes, all dependent on one another: the latter, on account of the masterly display of character, the beautiful contrast observable in the three leading individuals, and the simple structure of the piece, in which, with so few persons, every thing proceeds from the truest motives. But the whole of the tragedies of Sophocles are conspicuous for their separate excellences. In Antigone we have the purest display of female heroism; in Ajax the manly feeling of honour in its whole force; in the Trachiniæ, the female levity of Dejanira is beautifully atoned for by her death; and the sufferings of Hercules are pourtrayed with suitable dignity. Electra is distinguished for energy and pathos; in Œdipus Coloneus there prevails the mildest emotion, and over the whole piece there is diffused the utmost sweetness. I will not undertake to weigh the respective merits of these pieces against each other; but I am free to confess that I entertain a singular predilection for the last of them, as it appears to me the most expressive of the personal feelings of the poet himself. As this piece was written for the very purpose of throwing a lustre upon Athens, and the spot of his birth more particularly, he appears to have laboured it with a remarkable degree of fondness.’ p. 123.
In describing the Œdipus Coloneus, M. Schlegel has strikingly, and, we think, beautifully, exemplified the distinct genius of Sophocles and Æschylus, in the use these two poets make of the Furies.
‘In Æschylus,’ he says, ‘before the victim of persecution can be saved, the hellish horror of the Furies must congeal the blood of the spectator, and make his hair stand on end; and the whole rancour of these goddesses of rage must be exhausted. The transition to their peaceful retreat is therefore the more astonishing: It seems as if the whole human race were redeemed from their power. In Sophocles, however, they do not even once make their appearance, but are altogether kept in the back-ground; and they are not called by their proper name, but made known to us by descriptions, in which they are a good deal spared. But even this obscurity and distance, so suitable to these daughters of Night, is calculated to excite in us a still dread, in which the bodily senses have no part. The clothing the grove of the Furies with all the charms of a southern spring, completes the sweetness of the poem: and were I to select an emblem of the poetry of Sophocles from his tragedies, I should describe it as a sacred grove of the dark goddesses of Fate, in which the laurel, the olive, and the vine, display their luxuriant vegetation, and the song of the nightingale is for ever heard.’ p. 128.
After all, however, the tragedies of Sophocles, which are the perfection of the classical style, are hardly tragedies in our sense of the word. They do not exhibit the extremity of human passion and suffering. The object of modern tragedy is to represent the soul utterly subdued as it were, or at least convulsed and overthrown by passion or misfortune. That of the ancients was to show how the greatest crimes could be perpetrated with the least remorse, and the greatest calamities borne with the least emotion. Firmness of purpose, and calmness of sentiment, are their leading characteristics. Their heroes and heroines act and suffer as if they were always in the presence of a higher power, or as if human life itself were a religious ceremony, performed in honour of the Gods and of the State. The mind is not shaken to its centre; the whole being is not crushed or broken down. Contradictory motives are not accumulated; the utmost force of imagination and passion is not exhausted to overcome the repugnance of the will to crime; the contrast and combination of outward accidents are not called in to overwhelm the mind with the whole weight of unexpected calamity. The dire conflict of the feelings, the desperate struggle with fortune, are seldom there. All is conducted with a fatal composure. All is prepared and submitted to with inflexible constancy, as if Nature were only an instrument in the hands of Fate.
It is for deviating from this ideal standard, and for a nearer approximation to the frailty of human passion, that our author falls foul of Euripides without mercy. There is a great deal of affectation and mysticism in what he says on this subject. Allowing that the excellences of Euripides are not the same as those of Æschylus and Sophocles, or even that they are excellences of an inferior order, yet it does not follow that they are defects. The luxuriance and effeminacy with which he reproaches the style of Euripides might have been defects in those writers; but they are essential parts of his system. In fact, as Æschylus differs from Sophocles in giving greater scope to the impulses of the imagination, so Euripides differs from him in giving greater indulgence to the feelings of the heart. The heart is the seat of pure affection,—of involuntary emotion,—of feelings brooding over and nourished by themselves. In the dramas of Sophocles, there is no want of these feelings; but they are suppressed or suspended by the constant operation of the senses and the will. Beneath the rigid muscles by which the heart is there braced, there is no room left for those bursts of uncontrollable feeling, which dissolve it in tenderness, or plunge it into the deepest woe. In the heroic tragedy, no one dies of a broken heart,—scarcely a sigh is heaved, or a tear shed. Euripides has relaxed considerably from this extreme self-possession; and it is on that account that our critic cannot forgive him. The death of Alcestis alone might have disarmed his severity.
This play, which is the most beautiful of them all,—the Iphigenia, which is the next to it,—the Phædra and Medea, which are more objectionable, both from the nature of the subject, and the inferiority of the execution, are instances of the occasional use which Euripides made of the conflict of different passions. Though Antigone, in Sophocles, is in love with Hæmon, and though there was here an evident opportunity, and almost a necessity, for introducing a struggle between this passion, which was an additional motive to attach her to life, and her affection to the memory of her brother, which led her to sacrifice it, the poet has carefully avoided taking any advantage of the circumstance. Such is the spirit of the heroic tragedy, which suffers no other motives to interfere with the calm determination of the will, and which admits of nothing complicated in the development, either of the passions or the story! M. Schlegel decidedly prefers the Hippolytus of Euripides to the Phædra of Racine. His reasons he gives in another work, which we have not seen; but we are not at a loss to guess at them. His taste for poetry is just the reverse of the popular: He has a horror of whatever obtrudes itself violently on the notice, or tells at first sight; and is only disposed to admire those retired and recondite beauties which hide themselves from all but the eye of deep discernment. He relishes most those qualities in an author which require the greatest sagacity in the critic to find them out,—as none but connoisseurs are fond of the taste of olives. We shall say nothing here of the choice of the subject; but such as it is, Racine has met it more fully and directly: Euripides exhibits it, for the most part, in the back-ground. The Hippolytus is a dramatic fragment in which the principal events are given in a narrative form. The additions which Racine has chiefly borrowed from Seneca to fill up the outline, are, we think, unquestionable improvements. The declaration of love, to which our author particularly objects, is, however, much more gross and unqualified in Racine than in Seneca. The modern additions to the Iphigenia in Aulis, by Racine, as the love between Achilles and Iphigenia, and the jealousy of Eriphile, certainly destroy the propriety of costume, as M. Schlegel has observed, without heightening the tragic interest. In other respects, the French play is little more than an elegant, flowing, and somewhat diffuse paraphrase of the Greek. The most striking example of pathos in it is the ‘Tu y seras, ma fille,’ addressed by Agamemnon to his daughter, in answer to her wish to be present at the sacrifice, of which she is herself the destined victim.
Euripides was the model of Racine among the French, as he was of Seneca among the Romans. The remarks which Schlegel makes on this last-mentioned author are exceedingly harsh, dogmatical, and intolerant. They are as bad, and worse, than the sentence pronounced by Cowley on
——‘The dry chips of short-lung’d Seneca.’