True art imitates nature only in a very selective and limited way. It chooses carefully what it shall imitate, and all to the end of illumination. It paints a flower, or a sunset, not to reproduce the thing seen with the eyes, but to declare and set forth that mood of the Oversoul which the flower or the sunset expressed. Flower-colors or sunset-colors cannot be reproduced in pigments; but you can do things with pigments and a brush that can tell the same story. Or it can be done in words, in a poem; or with the notes of music;--in both of which cases the medium used is still more, and totally, unlike the medium through which the Oversoul said its say in the sky or the blossom.
Nature is always expressing these moods of the Oversoul; but we get no news of them, as a rule, from our own sight and hearing; we must wait for the poets and artists to interpret them. Life is always at work to teach us life; but we miss the grand lessons, usually, until some human Teacher enforces them. His methods are the same as those of the artists: between whose office and his there was at first no difference;--_Bard_ means only, originally, an Adept Teacher. Such a one selects experiences out of life for his pupils, and illumines them through the circ.u.mstances under which they are applied; just as the true artist selects objects from nature, and by his manner of treating them, interprets the greatness that lies beyond.
So the drama-theory of Aeschylus. He took fragments of possible experience, and let them be seen through a heightened and interpretative medium; with a light at once intense and somber- portentous thrown on them; and this not to reproduce the externalia and appearance of life, but to illumine its inner recesses; to enforce, in plays lasting an hour or so, the lessons life may take many incarnations to teach. This cannot be done by realism, imitation or reproduction of the actual; than which life itself is always better.
What keeps us from seeing the meanings of life? Personality.
Not only our own, but in all those about us. Personality dodges and flickers always between our eyes and the solemn motions, the adumbrations of the augustness beyond. We demand lots of personality in our drama; we call it character-drawing. We want to see fellows like ourselves lounging or bustling about, and hear them chattering as we do;--fellows with motives (like our own) all springing from the personality. Human life is what interests us: we desire to drink deep of it, and drink again and again. The music that we wish to hear is the "still, sad music of humanity";--that is, taking our theory at its best, and before you come down to sheer "jazz" and ragtime. But what interested Aeschylus was that which lies beyond and within life. He said: "You can get life in the Agora, on the Acropolis, any day of the week; when you come to the theater you shall have something else, and greater."
So he set his scenes, either in a vast, remote, and mysterious antiquity, or--in _The Persians_--at Susa before the palace of the Great King: a setting as remote, splendid, vast, and mysterious, to the Greek mind of the day, as the other. Things should not be as like life, but as unlike life, as possible. The plays themselves, as acted, were a combination of poetry, dance, statuesque poses and motions and groupings; there was no action.
All the action was done off the scenes. They did not portray the evolution of character; they hardly portrayed character--in the personal sense--at all. The _dramatis personae_ are types, symbols, the expression of natural forces, or principles in man.
In our drama you have a line, an extension forward in time; a progression from this to that point in time;--in Greek Tragedy you have a cross-section of time--a cutting through the atom of time that glimpses may be caught of eternity. There was no unfoldment of a story; but the presentation of a single mood.
In the chanted poetry and the solemn dance-movements a situation was set forth; what led up to it being explained retrospectively.
The audience knew what was coming as well as the author did: that Agamemnon, for instance, was to be murdered. So all was written to play on their expectations, not on their surprise.
There was a succession of perfect pictures; these and the poetry were to hold the interest, to work it up: to seize upon the people, and lead them by ever-heightening accessions of feeling into forgetfulness of their personal lives, and absorption in the impersonal harmony, the spiritual receptivity, from which the grand truths are visible. The actors" masks allowed only the facial expression of a single mood; and it was a single mood the dramatist aimed to produce: a unity; one great word. There could be no grave-diggers; no quizzing of Polonious; no clouds very like a whale. The whole drama is the unfoldment of a single moment: that, say, in which Hamlet turns on Caudius and kills him--rather, leads him out to kill him. To that you are led by a little spa.r.s.e dialog, ominous enough, and pregnant with dire significance, between two or three actors; many long speeches in which the story is told in retrospect; much chanting by the chorus--Horatio multiplied by a dozen or so--to make you feel Hamlet"s long indecision, and to allow you no escape from the knowledge that Claudius" crime would bring about its karmic punishment. It is a unity: one thunderbolt from Zeus;--first the growl and rumbling of the thunders; then the whirr of the dread missile,--and lo, the man dead that was to die. And through the bolt so hurled, so effective, and with it--the eagle-bark--Aeschylus crying _Karma!_ to the Athenians.
So it has been said that Aeschylean Tragedy is more nearly allied to sculpture; Shakespearean Tragedy to the Epic.
Think how that unchanging mask, that frozen moment of expression, would develop the quality of tragic irony. In it Clytemnestra comes out to greet the returning Agamemnon. She has her handmaids carpet the road for him with purple tapestries; she makes her speeches of welcome; she alludes to the old sacrifice of Iphigenia; she tells him how she has waited for his return;-- and all the while the audience knows she is about to kill him.
They listen to her doubtful words, in which she reveals to them, who know both already, her faithlessness and dire purpose; but to her husband, seems to reveal something different altogether.
With Agamemnon comes Ca.s.sandra from fallen Troy: whose fate was to foresee all woes and horror, and to forthtell what she saw-- and never to be believed; so now when she raises her dreadful cry, foreseeing what is about to happen, and uttering warning-- none believe her but the audience, who know it all in advance.
And then there are the chantings of the chorus, a group of Argive elders. They know or guess how things stand between the queen and her lover; they express their misgiving, gathering as the play goes on; they recount the deeds of violence of which the House of Atreus has been the scene, and are haunted by the foreshadowings of Karma. But they many not understand or give credence to the warnings of Ca.s.sandra: Karma disallows fore-fending against the fall of its bolts. Troy has fallen, they say: and that was Karma; because Paris, and Troy in supporting him, had sinned against Zeus the patron of hospitality,--to whom the offense rose like vultures with rifled nest, wheeling in mid-heaven on strong oars of wings, screaming for retribution.
--You may not that Aeschylus" freedom from the bonds of outer religion is like Shakespeare"s own: here Zeus figures as symbol of the Lords of Karma; from him flow the severe readjustments of the Law;--but in the _Prometheus Bound_ he stands for the lower nature that crucifies the Higher.
Troy, then, had sinned, and has fallen; but (says the Chorus) let the conquerors look to it that they do not overstep the mark; let there be no dishonoring the native G.o.ds of Troy; (the Athenians had been very considerably overstepping the mark in some of their own conquests recently;)--let there be no plundering or useless cruelty; (the Athenians had been hideously greedy and cruel;)--or Karma would overtake it own agents, the Greeks, who were not yet out of the wood, as we say--who had not yet returned home. This was when the beacons had announced the fall of Troy, and before the entry of Agamemnon.
Clytemnestra is not like Gertrude, but a much grander and more tragical figure. Shakespeare leaves you in no doubt as to his queen"s relation to Claudius; he enlarges on their guilty pa.s.sion _ad lib._ Aeschylus never mentions love at all in any of his extant plays; only barely hints at it here. It may be supposed to exist; it is an accessory motive; it lends irony to Clytemnestra"s welcome to Agamemnon--in which only the audience and the Chorus are aware that the lady does protest too much. But she stands forth in her own eyes as an agent of Karma-Nemesis; there is something very terrible and unhuman about her. Early in the play she reminds the Chorus how Agamemnon, is setting out for Troy, sacrificed his and her daughter Iphigenia to get a fair wind: a deed of blood whose consequences must be feared--something to add to the Chorus"s misgivings, as they chant their doubtful hope that the king may safely return. In reality Artemis had saved Igphigenia; and though Clytemnestra did not know this, in a.s.suming the position of her daughter"s avenger she put herself under the karmic ban. And Agamemnon did not know it: he had intended the sacrifice: and was therefore, and for his supposed ruthlessness at Troy, under the same ban himself. Hence the fate that awaited him on his return; and hence because of Clytemnestra"s useless crime--when she and Aegisthos come out from murdering him, and announce what they have done, the Chorus"s dark foretellings--to come true presently --of the Karma that is to follow upon it.
And here we must guard ourselves against the error--as I think it is that Aeschylus set himself to create the perfect and final art-form as such. I think he was just intent on announcing Karma to the Athenians in the most effective way possible: bent all his energies to making that--and that the natural result of that high issue clear and unescapable; purpose was this marvelous art-form--which Sophocles took up later, and in some external ways perhaps perfected. Then came Aristotle after a hundred years, and defining the results achieved, tried to make Shakespeare impossible. The truth is that when you put yourself to do the Soul"s work, and have the great forces of the Soul to back you therein, you create an art-form; and it only remains for the Aristotelian critic to define it. Then back comes the Soul after a thousand years, makes a new one, and laughs at the Aristotles. The grand business is done by following the Soul--not by conforming to rules or imitating models. But it must be the Soul; rules and models are much better than personal whims; they are a discipline good to be followed as long as one can.-- You will note how Aeschylus stood above the possibilities of actualism with which we so much concern ourselves; in the course of some sixteen hundred lines, and without interval or change of act or scene, he introduces the watchman on the house-top who first sees the beacons that announce the fall of Troy, on the very night that Troy fell,--and the return of Agamemnon in his chariot to Argos.
In the _Choephori_ or _Libation-Pourers,_ the second play of the trilogy, Orestes returns from his Wittenberg, sent by Apollo to avenge his father. The scene again is in front of the house of Atreus. Having killed Aegistlios within, Orestes comes out to the Chorus; then Clytemnestra enters; he tells her what he has done, and what he intends to do; and despite her pleadings, leads her in to die beside her paramour. He comes out again, bearing (for his justification) the blood-stained robe of Agamemnon;--but he comes out distraught and with the guilt of matricide weighing on his soul. The Chorus bids him be of good cheer, reminding him upon what high suggestion he has acted; but in the background he, and he alone, sees the Furies swarming to haunt him, "like Gorgons, dark-robed, and all their tresses hang entwined with many serpents; and from their eyes is dropping loathsome blood." He must wander the world seeking purification.
In the _Eumenides_ we find him in the temple of Loxias (the Apollo) at Delphi, there seeking refuge with the G.o.d who had prompted him to the deed. But even there the Furies haunt him-- though for weariness--or really because it is the shrine of Loxias--they have fallen asleep. From them even Loxias may not free him; only perhaps Pallas at Athens may do that; Loxias announces this to him and bids him go to Athens, and a.s.sures him meanwhile of his protection.
To Athens then the scene changes, where Orestes" case is tried: Apollo defends him; Pallas is the judge; the Furies the accusers; the Court of the Areopagus the jury. The votes of these are equally divided; but Athene gives her casting vote in his favor; and to compensate the Erinyes, turns them into Eumenides--from Furies to G.o.ddesses of good omen and fortune.
Orestes is free, and the end is happy.
No doubt very pretty and feeble of the bronze-throated Eagle- barker to make it so. What! clap on an exit to these piled-up miseries?--he should have plunged us deeper in woe, and left us to stew in our juices; he Should have shunned this detestable effeminacy, worthy only of the Dantes and Shakespeares. But unfortunately he was an Esotericist, with the business of helping, not plaguing, mankind: he must follow the grand symbolism of the story of the Soul, recording and emphasizing and showing the way to its victories, not its defeats. He had the eye to see deep into realities, and was not to be led from the path of truth eternal by the cheap effective expedients of realism.
He must tell the whole truth: building up, not merely destroying; and truth, at the end, is not bitter, but bright and glorious.
It is the triumph and purification of the soul; and to that happy consummation all sorrow and darkness and the dread Furies themselves, whom he paints with all the dark flame-pigments of sheerest terror, are but incidental and a means.
And the meaning of it all? Well, the meaning is as vast as the scheme of evolution itself, I suppose. It is _Hamlet_ over again, and treated differently; that which wrote _Hamlet_ through Shakespeare, wrote this Trilogy through Aeschylus. I imagine you are to find in the _Agamemnon_ the symbol of the Spirit"s fall into matter--of the incarnation (and obscuration) of the Lords of Mind--driven thereto by ancient Karma, and the result--of the life of past universes. Shakespeare deals with this retrospectively, in the Ghost"s words to Hamlet on the terrace. The "death" of the Spirit is its fall into matter.
And just as the ghost urges Hamlet to revenge, so Apollo urges Orestes; it is the influx, stir, or impingement of the Supreme Self, that rouses a man, at a certain stage in his evolution, to lift himself above his common manhood. This is the most interesting and momentous event in the long career of the soul: it takes the place, in that drama of incarnations, that the marriage does in the modern novel. Shakespeare, whose mental tendencies were the precise opposite of Aeschylus"s--they ran to infinite multiplicity and complexity, where the other"s ran to stern unity and simplicity (of plot)--made two characters of Polonius and Gertrude: Polonius,--the objective lower world, with its shallow wisdom and conventions; Gertrude,--Nature, the lower world in it subjective or inner relation to the soul incarnate in it. Aeschylus made no separate symbol for the former.
Shakespeare makes the killing of Polonius a turning-point; thenceforth Hamlet must, will he nill he, in some dawdling sort sweep to his revenge. Aeschylus makes that same turning-point in the killing of Clytemnestra, whereafter the Furies are let loose on Orestes. If you think well what it means, it is that "leap" spoken of in _Light on the Path,_ by which a man raises himself "on to the path of individual accomplishment instead of mere obedience to the genii which rule our earth."
He can no longer walk secure like a sheep in the flock; he has come out, and is separate; he has chosen a captain within, and must follow the Soul, and not outer convention. That step taken, and the face set towards the Spirit-Sun--the life of the world forgone, that a way may be fought into the Life of the Soul:--all his past lives and their errors rise against him; his pa.s.sions are roused to fight for their lives, and easy living is no longer possible. He must fly then for refuge to Loxias the Sun-G.o.d, the Supreme Self, who can protect him from these Erinyes--but it is Pallas, G.o.ddess of the Inner Wisdom, of the true method of life, that can alone set him free. And it is thus that Apollo pleads before her for Orestes who killed his mother (Nature) to avenge his Father (Spirit):--a man, says he, is in reality the child of his father, not of his mother:--this lower world in which we are incarnate is not in truth our parent or originator at all, but only the seed-plot in which we, sons of the Eternal, are sown, the nursery in which we grow to the point of birth;--but we ourselves are in our essence flame of the Flame of G.o.d. So Pallas--and you must think of all she implied--Theosophy, right living, right thought and action, true wisdom--judges Orestes guiltless, sets him free, and transforms his pa.s.sions into his powers.
V. SOME PERICLEAN FIGURES
Yoshio Markino (that ever-delightful j.a.panese) makes an illuminating comparison between the modern western and the ancient eastern civilizations. What he says amounts to this: the one is of Science, the other of the Human Spirit; the one of intellect, the other of intuition; the one has learnt rules for carrying all things through in some shape that will serve--the other worked its wonders by what may be called a Transcendental Rule of Thumb. But in fact it was a reliance on the Human Spirit, which invited the presence thereof;--and hence results were attained quite unachievable by modern scientific methods. What Yoshio says of the Chinese and j.a.panese is also true of all the great western ages of the past. We can do a number of things,-- that is, have invented machinery to do a number of things for us,--but with all our resources we could not build a Parthenon: could not even reproduce it, with the model there before our eyes to imitate.*
------ * I quote Prof. Mahaffy in his _Problems of Greek History._ He also points out that it is beyond the powers of modern science in naval architecture to construct a workable model of a Greek trireme.
It stands as a monument of the Human Spirit: as an age-long witness to the presence and keen activity of that during the Age of Pericles in Athens. It was built at almost break-neck speed, yet remains a thing of permanent inimitable beauty, defying time and the deliberate efforts of men and gunpowder to destroy it.
The work in it which no eye could see was as delicate, as exquisite, as that which was most in evidence publicly; every detail bore the deliberate impress of the Spirit, a direct spiritual creation. There is no straight line in it; no two measurements are the same; but by a divine and direct intuition, every difference is inevitable, and an essential factor in the perfection of the whole. As if the same creative force had made it, as makes of the sea and mountains an inescapable perfection of beauty.
It is one of the many mighty works wherewith Pericles and his right-hand man Pheidias, and his architects Ictinus and Callicrates, adorned Athens. It would serve no purpose to make a list of the great names of the age; which you know well enough already. The simple fact to note is this: that at a certain period in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. the Crest-Wave of Evolution was, so far as we can see, flowing through a very narrow channel. The Far Eastern seats of civilization were under pralaya; the life-forces in West Asia were running towards exhaustion, or already exhausted; India, it is true, is hidden from us; we cannot judge well what was going on there; and so was most of Europe. Any scheme of cycles that we can put forward as yet must necessarily be tentative and hypothetical; what we do not know is, to what we do know, as a million to one; I may be quite wrong in giving Europe as long a period for its manvantaras as China; possibly there were no manvantaric activities in Europe, in that period, before the rise of Greece.
But whether or no, this particular time belongs, of all European countries, to Greece: the genius of the world, the energy of the human spirit, was mainly concentrated there; and of Greece, in the single not too large city of Athens. It is true I am rather enamored of the cycle of a hundred and thirty years; prejudiced, if you like, in its favor; it is also true that genius was speaking through at least one world-important Athenian voice-- that of Aeschylus--before the age of Pericles began. Still, these dates are significant: 477, in which year Athens attained the hegemony of Greece, and 347, in which Plato died. It was after 477 that Aeschylus eagle-barked the grandest part of his message from the Soul, and that the great Periclean figures appeared; and though Athenians of genius out-lived Plato, he was the last world-figure and great Soul-Prophet; the last Athenian equal in standing to Aeschylus. When those thirteen decades had pa.s.sed, the Soul had little more to say through Athens.-- Aristotle?--I said, _the Soul_ had little more to say. . . .
About midway through that cycle came Aegospotami, and the destruction of the Long Walls and of the Empire; but these did not put an end to Athenian significance. Mahaffy very wisely goes to work to dethrone the Peloponnesian War--as he does, too, the Persian--from the eminence it has been given in the textbooks ever since. As usual, we get a lopsided view from the historians: in this case from Thucydides, who slurred through a sort of synopsis of the far more important and world-interesting mid-fifth century, and then dealt microscopically with these twenty-five years or so of trumpery raidings, petty excursions and small alarms. That naval battle at Syracuse, which Creasy puts with Marathon in his famous fifteen, was utterly unimportant: tardy Nicias might have won all through, and still Athens would have fallen. Her political foundations were on the sand. Under Persia you stood a much better chance of enjoying good government and freedom: Persian rule was far less oppressive and cruel. The states and islands subject to Athens had no self-government, no representation; they were at the mercy of the Athenian mob, to be taxed, bullied, and pommeled about as that fickle irresponsible tyranny might elect or be swayed to pommel, tax, and bully them. Thucydides was a great master of prose style, and so could invest with an air of importance all the matter of his tale. Besides, he was the only contemporary historian, or the only one that survives.
So the world ever since has been tricked into thinking this Peloponnesian War momentous; whereas really it was a petty family squabble among that most family-squabblesome of peoples, the Greeks.--In most of which I am only quoting Mahaffy; who, whether intentionally or not, deals with Greek history in such a way as to show the utter unimportance, irrelevance, futility, of war.
Greek history is merely a phase of human history. We have looked for its significance exclusively in political and cultural regions; but this is altogether a mistake. The Greeks did not invent culture; there had been greater cultures before, only they are forgotten. All that about the "evolution of Political freedom," of the city state, republicanism, etc., is just nonsense. As far as I can see, the importance of Greece lies in this: human history, the main part of it, flowing in that age through the narrow channel of Greece, came down from sacred to secular; from the last remnants of a state of affairs in which the Lodge, through the Mysteries, had controlled life and events, to the beginnings of one in which things were to muddle through under the sweet guidance of brain-minds and ordinary men.
The old order had become impossible; the world had drifted too far from the G.o.ds. So the G.o.ds tried a new method: let loose a new great force in the world; sent Teachers to preach openly (sow broadcast, and let the seed take its chances) what had before been concealed and revealed systematically within the Established Mysteries. What Athens did with that new force has affected the whole history of Europe since; apparently mostly for weal; really, nearly altogether for woe.
Aristides, with convincing logic, had been able to persuade all Greece to act against a common danger under an Athens then morally great, and feeling this new force from the G.o.d-world as a wine in the air, a mental ozone, an inspiration from the subliminal to heroic endeavor. But his policy perished when the visible need for it subsided; it gave way to the Themistoclean, which pa.s.sed into the Periclean policy; and that, says Mahaffy, "was so dangerous and difficult that no cautious and provident thinker could have called it secure." Which also was Plato"s view of it; who went so far as to say that Pericles had made the Athenians lazy, sensual, and frivolous. When we find Aeschylus at the start at odds with it, and Plato at the end condemning it wholesale,--for my part I think we hardly need bother to argue about it further. Both were men who saw from a standpoint above the enlightenment of the common brain-mind.
It is not the present purpose to treat history as a matter of wars and politics; details of which you can get from any textbook; our concern is with the motions of the human spirit, and the laws that work from behind. As to these motions, and the grand influxes, there is this much we can rely on: they come by law, in their regular cycles; and we can invite their coming, and insure their stability when they do come. The more I study history, the more the significance of my present surroundings impresses me. We stand here upon a marvelous isthmus in time; behind us lies a world of dreary commonplaces called the civilization of Christendom; before us--who knows what possibilities?
Nothing is certain about the future--even the near future;--except that it will be immensely unlike the past. Whatever we have learned or failed to learn, large opportunities are given us daily for discovering those inward regions whence all light shines down into the world. Genius is one method of the Soul"s action; one aspect of its glory made manifest. We are given opportunities to learn what invites and what hinders its outflow.
To all common thinking, it is a thing absolutely beyond control of the will; that cannot be called down, nor its coming in anywise foretold. But we know that the Divine Self would act, were the obstructions to its action removed; and that the obstructions are all in the lower nature of man.
Worship the Soul in all thoughts and deeds, and sooner or later the Soul will pour down through the channel thus made for it; and its inflow will not be fitful and treacherous, but sure, stable, equable and redeeming.
This is where all past ages of brilliance have failed. Cyclically they were bound to come: the fields ripened in due season; but the wealth of the harvest depended on the reapers. The Elizabethan Age, with all its splendid quickening of the English mind, was coa.r.s.e and wicked to a degree. All through the wonderful Cinquecento, when each of a dozen or more little Italian city-states was producing genius enough to furnish forth a good average century in modern Europe or America, Italy was also a hotbed of unnatural vices, lurid crimes, wickedness to stock the nine circles of Malebolge. So too Athens at the top of her glory became selfish, grasping, conscienceless and cruel; and those nameless vices grew up and grew common in her which probably account for the long dark night that has spread itself over Greece ever since. It is a strange situation, that looks like an anomaly: that wherever the Human Spirit presses in most, and raises up most splendor of genius, there, and then the dark forces that undermine life are most at work. But we should have no difficulty in understanding it. At such times, by such influxes, the whole inner kingdom of man is roused and illumined; and not only the intellect and all n.o.ble qualities are quickened, but the pa.s.sions also. The race, and the individual, are stirred to the deepest depths, and no part of you may have rest. What then will happen, unless you have the surest moral training for foundation? The force which rouses up the highest in you, rouses up also the lowest; and there must be battle-royal and victory at last, or surrender to h.e.l.l. Through lack of training, and ignorance of the laws of the inner life, the Higher will be handicapped; the lower will have advantage through its own natural impulse downward, increased by every success it is allowed to gain. And so all these ages of creative achievement exhaust themselves; every victory of the pa.s.sions drawing down the creative force from the higher planes, to waste it on the lower; till at last what had been an attempt of the Spirit to lift humanity up on to n.o.bler lines of evolution, and to open a new order of ages, expires in debauchery, weakness, degeneracy, physical and moral death. The worst fate you could wish a man is genius without moral strength. It wrecks individuals, and it wrecks nations. I said we stand now on an isthmus of time; fifth-century Greece stood on such another. For reasons that we have seen, there was to be a radical difference between the ages that preceded, and the ages that followed it; its influence was not to wear out, in the west, for twenty-five hundred years. It was to give a keynote, in cultural effort, to a very long future.
So all western ages since have suffered because of its descent from lofty ideals to vulgar greed and ambition; from Aristides to Themistocles and Pericles. We shall see this Athenian descent in literature, in art, in philosophy. If Athens had gone up, not down, European history would have been a long record of the triumphs of the spirit:--not, as it has been in the main, one of sorrow and disaster.
At the beginning of the Greek age in literature, we find the stupendous figure of Aeschylus. For any such a force as he was, there is--how shall I say?--a twofold lineage or ancestry to be traced: there are no sudden creations. Take Shakespeare, for example. There was what he found read to his hand in English literature; and what he brought into England out of the Unknown.
In his outwardness, the fabric of his art--we can trace this broad river back to a thinnish stream by the name of Chaucer; or he was growth, recognizably, of the national tree of which Chaucer was the root, or lay at the root. The unity called English poetry had grown naturally from that root to this glorious flower: the sparkle, with, brightness, and above all large hold upon the other life that one finds in Shakespeare--one finds at least the rudiments of them in Chaucer also. But there is another, an exoteric element in him which one finds nowhere in English literature before him: the Grandeur from within, the high Soul Symbol. In him suddenly that portentous thing appears, like a great broad river emerging from the earth.--Of which we do not say, however, that they have had no antecedent rills and fountain; we know that they have traveled long beneath the mountains, unseen; they sank under the earth-surface somewhere, and are not special new creations. Looking back behind Shakespeare, from this our eminence in time, we can see beyond the intervening heights this broad water shine again over the plain in Dante; and beyond him some glimmer of it in Virgil; until at last we see the far-off sheen of it in Aeschylus, very near the backward horizon of time. We can catch no glimpse of it farther, because that horizon is there.
We can trace Aeschylus" outward descent--as Shakespeare"s from Chaucer--from the nascent Greek drama and the rudimentary plays at the rustic festivals; but the grand river of his esotericism --there it shines, as large and majestic, at least, as in Shakespeare; and it was, no more than his, a special creation or new thing. Our horizon lies there, to prevent our vision going further; but from some higher time-eminence in the future, we shall see it emerge again in the backward vastnesses of pre-history; again and again. The grandeur of Aeschylus his no parent in Greek, or in western extant literature; or if we say that it has a parent in Homer (which I doubt, because not seeing the Soul Symbols in Homer), it is only putting matters one step further back.... But behind Greece, there were the lost literatures of Babylonia, a.s.syria, Egypt, of which we know nothing; aye, and for a guess, lost and mighty literatures from all parts of Europe too. If I could imagine it otherwise, I would say so.
Almost suddenly, during Aeschylus" lifetime, another Greek Art came into being. When he was a boy, sculpture was still a very crude affair; or perhaps just beginning to emerge from that condition. The images that come down to us, say from Pisistratus"
time and earlier, are not greatly different from the "primitive"
carvings of many so-called savage peoples of our own day. That statement is loose and general; but near enough the mark to serve our purpose. You may characterize them as rude imitations of the human form, without any troublesome realism, and with a strong element of the grotesque. Says the _Encyclopeadia Britannica_ (from which the ill.u.s.tration is taken):
"The statues of the G.o.ds began either with stiff and ungainly figures roughly cut out of the trunk of a tree, or with the monstrous and symbolical representations of Oriental art.... In early decorations of vases and vessels one may find Greek deities represented with wings, carrying in their hands lions or griffins, bearing on their heads lofty crowns. But as Greek art progressed it grew out of this crude symbolism... What the artists of Babylonia and Egypt express in the character of the G.o.ds by added attribute or symbol, swiftness by wings, control of storms by the thunderbolt, traits of character by animal heads, the artists of Greece work more and more fully into the scultptural type; modifying the human subject by the constant addition of something which is above the ordinary levels of humanity, until we reach the Zeus of Pheidias or the Dimeter of Cnidus. When the decay of the high ethical art of Greece sets in, the G.o.ds become more and more warped to the merely human level. They lose their dignity, but they never lose their charm."
In which, I think, much light is once more thrown on the inner history of the race, and the curious and fatal position Greece holds in it. For here we see Art emerging from its old Position as a hand-maid to the Mysteries and recognized instrument of the G.o.ds or the Soul; from sacred becoming secular; from impersonal, personal. There is, perhaps, little enough in pre-Pheidian Greek sculpture that belongs to the history of Art at all (I do not speak of old cycles and manvantaras, the ages of Troy and Mycenae, but of historical times; I cast no glance now behind the year 870 B. C.). For the real art that came next before the Pheidian Greek, we have to look to Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Take Egypt first. There the sculptor thinks of himself far less as artist than as priest and servant of the Mysteries: that is, of the great Divine heart of Existence behind this manifested world, and the official channel which connected It with the latter. The G.o.ds, for him, are frankly unhuman--superhuman-- unlike humanity. We call them "forces of Nature"; and think ourselves mighty wise for having camouflaged our ignorance with this perfectly meaningless term. We have dealt so wisely with our thinking organs, that do but give us a sop of words, and things in themselves we shall never bother about:--like the Grave-digger, who solved the whole problem of Ophelia"s death and burial with his three branches of an act. But the Egyptian, with mental faculties unrotted by creedal fatuities like our own, would not so feed "of the chameleon"s dish,"--needed something more than words, words, and words. He knew also that there were elements in their being quite unlike any we are conscious of in ours. So he gave them purely symbolic forms: a human body, for that which he could posit as common to themselves and humanity; and an animal mask, to say that the face, the expression of their consciousness, was hidden, and not to be expressed in terms of human personality. While affirming that they were conscious ent.i.ties, he stopped short of personalizing them. What was beneath the mask or symbol belonged to the Mysteries, and was not to be publicly declared.
But when he came to portraying men, especially great kings, he used a different method. The king"s statue was to remain through long ages, when the king himself was dead and Osirified. The artist knew--it was the tradition of his school--what the Osirified dead looked like. Not an individual sculptor, but a traditional wisdom, was to find expression. What sculptor"s name is known? Who wrought the Vocal Memnon?--Not any man; but the Soul and wisdom and genius of Egypt. The last things bothered about were realism and personality. There were a very few conventional poses; the object was not to make a portrait, but to declare the Universal Human Soul;--it was hardly artistic, in any modern acceptation of the word; but rather religious.
Artistic it was, in the highest and truest sense: to create, in the medium of stone, the likeness or impression of the Human Soul in its grandeur and majesty; to make hard granite or syenite proclaim the eternal peace and aloofness of the Soul.--Plato speaks of those glimpses of "the other side of the sky" which the soul catches before it comes into the flesh;--the Egyptian artist was preoccupied with the other side of the sky. How wonderfully he succeeded, you have only to drop into the British Museum to see. There is a colossal head there, hung high on the wall facing the stairs at the end of the Egyptian Gallery; you may view it from the ground, or from any point on the stairs; but from whatever place you look at it, if you have any quality of the Soul in you, you go away having caught large glimpses of the other side of the sky. You are convinced, perhaps unconsciously, of the grandeur and reality of the Soul. Having watched Eternity on that face many times, I rejoiced to find this description of it in De Quincey;--if he was not speaking of this, what he says fits it admirably:
"That other object which for four and twenty years in the British Museum struck me as simply the sublimest sight which in this sight-seeing world I had seen. It was the memnon"s head, then recently brought from Egypt. I looked at it, as the reader must suppose in order to understand the depth which I have here ascribed to the impression, not as a human but as a symbolic head; and what it symbolized to me were: (1) the peace which pa.s.seth understanding. (2) The eternity which baffles and confounds all faculty of computation--the eternity which had been, the eternity which was to be. (3) The diffusive love, not such as rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality, not such as sinks and swells by undulations of time, but a procession, an emanation, from some mystery of endless dawn. You durst not call it a smile that radiated from those lips; the radiation was too awful to clothe itself in adumbrations of memorials of flesh."