William Shakespeare

CHAPTER VIII

Aristophanes loved Æschylus by that law of affinity which causes Marivaux to love Racine tragedy and comedy made to understand each other.

The same distracted and all-powerful breath fills Æschylus and Aristophanes. They are the two inspired spirits of the antique mask.

Aristophanes, who is not yet judged, adhered to the mysteries, to Cecropian poetry, to Eleusis, to Dodona, to the Asiatic twilight, to the profound pensive dream. This dream, whence sprung the art of Egina, was at the threshold of the Ionian philosophy in Thales as well as at the threshold of the Italian philosophy in Pythagoras. It was the sphinx guarding the entrance.

This sphinx has been a muse, – the great pontifical and lascivious muse of universal rut; and Aristophanes loved it This sphinx breathed tragedy into Æschylus, and comedy into Aristophanes. It had something of Cybele. The ancient sacred immodesty is in Aristophanes. At moments he has Bacchus foaming at the lips. He came from the Dionysia, or from the Aschosia, or from the great Trieteric Orgy, and he strikes one as a raving maniac of the mysteries. His wild verse resembles the bassaride hopping giddily upon bladders filled with air. Aristophanes has the sacerdotal obscurity. He is for nudity against love. He denounces the Phedras and Sthenobæas, and he creates Lysistrata.

Let no one be deceived on this point; it was religion, and a cynic was an austere mind. The gymnosophists were the point of intersection between lewdness and thought The he-goat, with its philosopher's beard, belonged to that sect That dark ecstatic and bestial Oriental spirit lives still in the santon, the dervish, and the fakir. The corybantes were a kind of Greek fakirs. Aristophanes, like Diogenes, belonged to that family. Æschylus, by the Oriental bent of his nature, nearly belonged to it himself, but he retained the tragic chastity.

That mysterious naturalism was the ancient spirit of Greece. It was called poetry and philosophy. It had under it the group of the seven sages, one of whom, Periander, was a tyrant. Now, a certain vulgar, mean spirit appeared with Socrates. It was sagacity clearing and bottling up wisdom. Reduction of Thales and Pythagoras to the immediate true. Such was the operation. A sort of filtering, which, purifying and weakening, allowed the ancient divine doctrine to percolate, drop by drop, and become human. These simplifications disgust fanaticism; dogmas object to a process of sifting. To ameliorate a religion is to lay violent hands on it. Progress offering its services to Faith, offends it. Faith is an ignorance which professes to know, and which, in certain cases, knows perhaps more than Science. In the face of the lofty affirmations of believers, Socrates had an uncomfortably sly half-smile. There is something of Voltaire in Socrates. Socrates denounces all the Eleusinian philosophy as unintelligible and indiscernible; and he said to Euripides that to understand Heraclitus and the old philosophers, "one required to be a swimmer of Delos," – in other words, a swimmer capable of landing on an isle which was always receding before him. That was impiety and sacrilege for the ancient Hellenic naturalism. There was no other cause for the antipathy of Aristophanes toward Socrates.

This antipathy was quite fearful. The poet showed himself a persecutor; he has lent assistance to the oppressors against the oppressed, and his comedy has been guilty of crimes. Aristophanes has remained in the eyes of posterity in the condition of a wicked genius, – fearful punishment! But there is for him one attenuating circumstance: he was an ardent admirer of the poet of "Prometheus," and to admire him was to defend him. Aristophanes did what he could to prevent his banishment; and if anything can diminish one's indignation in reading the "Clouds," implacable on Socrates, it is that one may see in the background the hand of Aristophanes holding the mantle of Æschylus going into exile. Æschylus has likewise a comedy, a sister of the broad farce of Aristophanes. We have spoken of his mirth. It goes very far in "The Argians." It equals Aristophanes, and outstrips the Shrove Tuesday of our Carnival. Listen: "He throws at my head a chamber utensil. The full vase falls on my head, and is broken, odoriferous, but in a different manner from an urnful of perfume." Who says that? Æschylus. And in his turn Shakespeare will come and will exclaim through Falstaff's lips: "Empty the jorden." What can you say? You have to deal with savages.

One of those savages is Molière: witness from one end to the other the "Malade Imaginaire." Racine also is in a degree one of them: see "Les Plaideurs," already mentioned.

The Abbé Camus was a witty bishop, – a rare thing at all times; and what is more, he was a good man. He would have deserved this reproach of another bishop: "Bon jusqu'à la bêtise." Perhaps he was good because he had wit He gave to the poor all the revenue of his bishopric of Belley. He objected to canonization. It was he who said, "Il n'est chasse que de vieux chiens et châsse que de vieux saints;" and although he did not like the new-comers in sanctity, he was a friend of Saint François de Sales, by whose advice he wrote novels. He relates in one of his letters that one day François de Sales said to him: "The Church laughs readily."

Art also laughs readily. Art, which is a temple, has its laughter. Whence comes this hilarity? All at once, in the midst of chefs-d'œuvre, serious figures, a buffoon stands up and blurts out, – a chef-d'œuvre also. Sancho Panza jostles Agamemnon. All the marvels of thought are there; irony comes to complicate and complete them. Enigma. Behold art, great art, breaking into an excess of gayety. Its problem, matter, amuses it. It was forming it, now it deforms it. It was shaping it for beauty, now it delights in extracting from it ugliness. It seems to forget its responsibility. It does not forget it, however; for suddenly, behind the grimace, philosophy makes its appearance, – a philosophy smooth, less sidereal, more terrestrial, quite as mysterious as the grave philosophy. The unknown which is in man, and the unknown which is in things, face each other; and it turns out that in the act of meeting, these two augurs, Nature and Fate, cannot keep their serious countenance. Poetry, laden with anxieties, befools – whom? Itself. A mirth, which is not serenity, gushes out from the incomprehensible. An unknown, lofty, and sinister raillery flashes its lightning through the human darkness. The shadows piled up around us play with our soul. Formidable blossoming of the unknown. The jest proceeds from the abyss.

This alarming mirth in art is called, in olden times, Aristophanes, and in modern times, Rabelais.

When Pratinas the Dorian had invented the play with satyrs, comedy making its appearance opposite tragedy, mirth by the side of mourning, the two styles ready perhaps to unite, it was a matter of scandal. Agathon, the friend of Euripides, went to Dodona to consult Loxias. Loxias is Apollo. Loxias means crooked; and Apollo was called The Crooked, on account of his oracles being always obscure and full of ambiguous meanings. Agathon inquired from Apollo whether the new style was not impious, and whether comedy existed by right as well as tragedy. Loxias answered, "Poetry has two ears."

This answer, which Aristotle declares obscure, seems to us very clear. It sums up the entire law of art. Two problems, in fact, are presented. In the full light the first problem, – noisy, tumultuous, stormy, clamorous, the vast vital causeway, offering every direction to the ten thousand feet of man; the quarrels, the uproar, the passions with their why; the evil, which undergoes suffering the first, for to be evil is worse than doing it; sorrows, griefs, tears, cries, rumours. In the shade, the second one, mute problem, immense silence, with an inexpressible and terrible meaning. And poetry has two ears, – one which listens to life, the other which listens to death.

CHAPTER IX

The power that Greece had to evolve her luminous effluvia is prodigious, – even like that to-day which we see in France. Greece did not colonize without civilizing, – an example that more than one modern nation might follow. To buy and sell is not everything.

Tyre bought and sold; Berytus bought and sold; Sidon bought and sold; Sarepta bought and sold. Where are these cities? Athens taught; Athens is still at this hour one of the capitals of human thought.

The grass is growing on the six steps of the tribune where spoke Demosthenes; the Ceramicus is a ravine half-choked with the marble-dust which was once the palace of Cecrops; the Odeon of Herod Atticus at the foot of the Acropolis is now but a ruin on which falls, at certain hours, the imperfect shadow of the Parthenon; the temple of Theseus belongs to the swallows; the goats browse on the Pnyx. Still the Greek spirit is living; still Greece is queen; still Greece is goddess. A commercial firm passes away; a school remains.

It is curious to say to one's self to-day that twenty-two centuries ago small towns, isolated and scattered on the outskirts of the known world, possessed, all of them, theatres. In point of civilization, Greece began always by the construction of an academy, of a portico, or of a logeum. Whoever could have seen, nearly at the same period, rising at a short distance one from the other, in Umbria, the Gallic town of Sens (now Sinigaglia), and, near Vesuvius, the Hellenic city Parthenopea (at present Naples), would have recognized Gaul by the big stone standing all red with blood, and Greece by the theatre.

This civilization by poetry and art had such a mighty force that sometimes it subdued even war. The Sicilians – Plutarch relates it in speaking of Nicias – gave liberty to the Greek prisoners who sang the verses of Euripides.

Let us point out some very little known and very singular facts.

The Messenian colony, Zancle, in Sicily; the Corinthian colony, Corcyra, distinct from the Corcyra of the Absyrtides Islands; the Cycladian colony, Cyrene, in Libya; the three Phocean colonies, Helea in Lucania, Palania in Corsica, Marseilles in France, had theatres. The gad-fly having pursued Io all along the Adriatic Gulf, the Ionian Sea reached as far as the harbour of Venetus, and Tregeste (now Trieste) had a theatre. A theatre at Salpe, in Apulia; a theatre at Squillacium, in Calabria; a theatre at Thernus, in Livadia; a theatre at Lysimachia, founded by Lysimachus, Alexander's lieutenant; a theatre at Scapta-Hyla, where Thucydides had gold-mines; a theatre at Byzia, where Theseus had lived; a theatre in Chaonia, at Buthrotum, where performed those equilibrists from Mount Chimera whom Apuleius admired on the Pœcile; a theatre in Pannonia, at Bude, where the Metanastes were, – that is to say, the "Transplanted." Many of these colonies, situated afar, were much exposed. In the Isle of Sardinia, which the Greeks named Ichnusa, on account of its resemblance to the sole of the foot, Calaris (now Cagliari) was, so to speak, under the Punic clutch; Cibalis, in Mysia, had to fear the Triballi; Aspalathon, the Illyrians; Tomis, the future resting-place of Ovid, the Scordisci; Miletus, in Anatolia, the Massagetes; Denia, in Spain, the Cantabrians; Salmydessus, the Molossians; Carsina, the Tauro-Scythians; Gelonus, the Arymphæans of Sarmatia who lived on acorns; Apollonia, the Hamaxobians, wandering in their chariots; Abdera, the birth-place of Democritus, the Thracians, men tattooed all over, – all these towns, by the side of their citadel, had a theatre. Why? Because the theatre keeps alight the flame of love for the fatherland. Having the barbarians at their gates, it was important that they should remain Greeks. The national spirit is the strongest of bulwarks.

The Greek drama was profoundly lyrical. It was often less a tragedy than a dithyramb. It had occasionally strophes as powerful as swords. It rushed on the scene, wearing the helmet, and it was an ode armed cap-à-pie. We know what a Marseillaise can do.

Many of these theatres were in granite, some in brick. The theatre of Apollonia was in marble. The theatre of Salmydessus, which could be moved to the Doric place or to the Epiphanian place, was a vast scaffolding rolling on cylinders, after the fashion of those wooden towers which they thrust against the stone towers of besieged towns.

And what poet did they play by preference at these theatres? Æschylus.

Æschylus was for Greece the autochthonic poet. He was more than Greek, he was Pelasgian. He was born at Eleusis; and not only was he Eleusian, but Eleusiatic, – that is to say, a believer. It is the same shade as English and Anglican. The Asiatic element, the grandiose deformation of this genius, increased respect for it; for people said that the great Dionysus, that Bacchus, common to the West and the East, came in Æschylus's dreams to dictate to him his tragedies. You find again here the "familiar spirit" of Shakespeare.

Æschylus, Eupatride, and Eginetic struck the Greeks as more Greek than themselves. In those times of code and dogma mingled together, to be sacerdotal was an elevated way of being national. Fifty-two of his tragedies had been crowned. On leaving the theatre after the performance of the plays of Æschylus, the men would strike the shields hung at the doors of the temples, crying, "Fatherland, fatherland!" Let us add here, that to be hieratic did not hinder him from being demotic. Æschylus loved the people, and the people adored him. There are two sides to greatness: majesty is one, familiarity is the other. Æschylus was familiar with the turbulent and generous mob of Athens. He often gave to that mob a fine part in his plays. See, in the "Orestias," how tenderly the chorus, which is the people, receive Cassandra! The queen uses the slave roughly, and scares him whom the chorus tries to reassure and soothe. Æschylus had introduced the people in his grandest works, – in "Pentheus," by the tragedy of "The Woolcombers;" in "Niobe," by the tragedy of the "Nurses;" in "Athamas," by the tragedy of the "Net-drawers;" in "Iphigenia," by the tragedy of the "Bed-Makers." It was on the side of the people that he turned the balance in that mysterious drama, "The Weighing of Souls."¹⁴ Therefore had he been chosen to preserve the sacred fire.

In all the Greek colonies they played the "Orestias" and "The Persians." Æschylus being present, the fatherland was no longer absent. The magistrates ordered these almost religious representations. The gigantic Æschylean theatre was intrusted with watching over the infancy of the colonies. It enclosed them in the Greek spirit, it guaranteed them from the influence of bad neighbours, and from all temptations of being led astray. It preserved them from foreign contact, it maintained them within the Hellenic circle. It was there as a warning. All those young offsprings of Greece were, so to speak, placed under the care of Æschylus.

In India they readily give the children into the charge of elephants. These enormous specimens of goodness watch over the little things. The whole group of flaxen heads sing, laugh, and play under the shade of the trees. The habitation is at some distance. The mother is not with them. She is at home, busy with her domestic cares; she pays no attention to her children. Yet, joyful as they are, they are in danger. These beautiful trees are treacherous; they hide under their thickness thorns, claws, and teeth. There the cactus bristles up, the lynx roams, the viper crawls. The children must not wander away; beyond a certain limit they would be lost. Nevertheless, they run about, call to one another, pull and entice one another away, some of them scarcely stuttering, and quite unsteady on their little feet. At times one of them goes too far. Then a formidable trunk is stretched out, seizes the little one, and gently carries him home.

CHAPTER X

There were some copies more or less complete of Æschylus.

Besides the copies in the colonies, which were limited to a small number of pieces, it is certain that partial copies of the original at Athens were made by the Alexandrian critics and scholars, who have left us some fragments, – among others the comic fragment of "The Argians," the Bacchic fragment of the "Edons," the lines cited by Stobæus, and even the probably apocryphal verses given by Justin the Martyr.

These copies, buried but perhaps not destroyed, have buoyed up the persistent hope of searchers, – notably of Le Clerc, who published in Holland, in 1709, the discovered fragments of Menander. Pierre Pelhestre, of Rouen, the man who had read everything, for which the worthy Archbishop Péréfixe scolded him, affirmed that the greater part of the poems of Æschylus would be found in the libraries of the monasteries of Mount Athos, just as the five books of the "Annals" of Tacitus had been discovered in the Convent of Corwey in Germany, and the "Institutions" of Quintilian, in an old tower of the Abbey of St. Gall.

A tradition, not undisputed, would have it that Euergetes II. had returned to Athens, not the original copy of Æschylus, but a copy, leaving the fifteen talents as a compensation.

Independently of the story about Euergetes and Omar that we have related, and which, very true in the whole, is perhaps legendary in more than one particular, the loss of so many beautiful works of antiquity is but too well explained by the small number of copies. Egypt, in particular, transcribed everything on papyrus. The papyrus, being very dear, became very rare. People were reduced to write on pottery. To break a vase was to destroy a book. About the time when Jesus Christ was painted on the walls at Rome, with the hoofs of an ass, and this inscription, "The God of the Christians, hoof of an ass," in the third century, to make ten manuscripts of Tacitus yearly, – or, as we should say to-day, to strike off ten copies of his works, – a Cæsar must needs call himself Tacitus, and believe Tacitus to be his uncle. And yet Tacitus is nearly lost. Of the twenty-eight years of his "History of the Cæsars," – from the year 69 to the year 96, – we have but one complete year, 69, and a fragment of the year 70. Euergetes prohibited the exportation of papyrus, which caused parchment to be invented. The price of papyrus was so high that Firmius the Cyclop, manufacturer of papyrus in 270, made by his trade enough money to raise armies, wage war against Aurelian, and declare himself emperor.

Gutenberg is a redeemer. These submersions of the works of the mind, inevitable before the invention of printing, are impossible at present. Printing is the discovery of the inexhaustible. It is perpetual motion found for social science. From time to time a despot seeks to stop or to slacken it, and he is worn away by the friction. The impossibility to shackle thought, the impossibility to stop progress, the book imperishable, – such is the result of printing. Before printing, civilization was subject to losses of substance; the essential signs of progress, proceeding from such a philosopher or such a poet, were all at once lacking: a page was suddenly torn from the human book. To disinherit humanity of all the great bequests of genius, the stupidity of a copyist or the caprice of a tyrant sufficed. No such danger in the present day. Henceforth the unseizable reigns. No one could serve a writ upon thought and take up its body. It has no longer a body. The manuscript was the body of the masterpiece; the manuscript was perishable, and carried off the soul, – the work. The work, made a printed sheet, is delivered. It is now only a soul. Kill now this immortal! Thanks to Gutenberg, the copy is no longer exhaustible. Every copy is a root, and has in itself its own possible regeneration in thousands of editions; the unit is pregnant with the innumerable. This prodigy has saved universal intelligence. Gutenberg, in the fifteenth century, emerges from the awful obscurity, bringing out of the darkness that ransomed captive, the human mind. Gutenberg is forever the auxiliary of life; he is the permanent fellow-workman in the great work of civilization. Nothing is done without him. He has marked the transition of the man-slave to the free-man. Try and deprive civilization of him, you become Egypt. The decrease of the liberty of the press is enough to diminish the stature of a people.

One of the great features in this deliverance of man by printing, is, let us insist on it, the indefinite preservation of poets and philosophers. Gutenberg is like the second father of the creations of the mind. Before him, yes, it was possible for a chef-d'œuvre to die.

Greece and Rome have left – mournful thing to say – vast ruins of books. A whole facade of the human mind half crumbled, that is antiquity. Here the ruin of an epic poem, there a tragedy dismantled; great verses effaced, buried, and disfigured; pediments of ideas almost entirely fallen; geniuses truncated like columns; palaces of thought without ceiling and door; bleached bones of poems; a death's-head which has been a strophe; immortality in ruins. Fearful nightmare! Oblivion, dark spider, hangs its web between the drama of Æschylus and the history of Tacitus.

Where is Æschylus? In pieces everywhere. Æschylus is scattered in twenty texts. His ruins must be sought in innumerable different places. Athenæus gives the dedication "To Time," Macrobius the fragment of "Etna" and the homage to the Palic gods, Pausanias the epitaph. The biographer is anonymous; Goltzius and Meursius give the titles of the lost pieces.

We know from Cicero, in the "Disputationes Tusculanæ," that Æschylus was a Pythagorean; from Herodotus, that he fought bravely at Marathon; from Diodorus of Sicily, that his brother Amynias behaved valiantly at Platæa; from Justin, that his brother Cynegyrus was heroic at Salamis. We know by the didascalies that "The Persians" were represented under the archon Meno, "The Seven Chiefs before Thebes" under the archon Theagenides, and the "Orestias" under the archon Philocles; we know from Aristotle that Æschylus was the first to venture to make two personages speak at a time on the stage; from Plato that the slaves were present at his plays; from Horace, that he invented the mask and the buskin; from Pollux, that pregnant women miscarried at the appearance of his Furies; from Philostratus, that he abridged the monodies; from Suidas, that his theatre tumbled down under the pressure of the crowd; from Ælian, that he committed blasphemy; from Plutarch, that he was exiled; from Valerius Maximus, that an eagle killed him by letting a tortoise fall on his head; from Quintilian, that his plays were re-cast; from Fabricius, that his sons are accused of this crime of laze-paternity; from the Arundel marbles, the date of his birth, the date of his death, and his age, – sixty-nine years.

Now, take away from the drama the East and replace it by the North; take away Greece and put England, take away India and put Germany, that other immense mother, All-men (Allemagne); take away Pericles and put Elizabeth; take away the Parthenon and put the Tower of London; take away the plebs and put the mob; take away the fatality and put the melancholy; take away the gorgon and put the witch; take away the eagle and put the cloud; take away the sun and put on the heath, shuddering in the evening wind, the livid light of the moon, and you have Shakespeare.

Given the dynasty of men of genius, the originality of each being absolutely reserved, the poet of the Carlovingian formation being the natural successor of the poet of the Jupiterian formation and the gothic mist of the antique mystery, Shakespeare is Æschylus II.

There remains the right of the French Revolution, creator of the third world, to be represented in Art. Art is an immense gaping chasm, ready to receive all that is within possibility.