Greek Studies A Series of Essays 4

Greek Studies A Series of Essays 4

This tragedy of the Bacchanals--a sort of masque or morality, as we

say--a monument as central for the legend of Dionysus as the Homeric

hymn for that of Demeter, is unique in Greek literature, and has also

a singular interest in the life of Euripides himself. He is writing

in old age (the piece was not played till after his death) not at

Athens, nor for a polished Attic audience, but for a wilder and less

temperately cultivated sort of people, at the court of Archelaus, in

Macedonia. Writing in old age, he is in that subdued mood, a mood

not necessarily sordid, in which (the shudder at the nearer approach

of the unknown world coming over him more frequently than of old)

accustomed ideas, conformable to a sort of common sense regarding the

unseen, oftentimes regain what they may have lost, in a man's

allegiance. It is a sort of madness, he begins to think, to differ

from the received opinions thereon. Not that he is insincere or

ironical, but that he tends, in the [55] sum of probabilities, to

dwell on their more peaceful side; to sit quiet, for the short

remaining time, in the reflexion of the more cheerfully lighted side

of things; and what is accustomed--what holds of familiar usage--

comes to seem the whole essence of wisdom, on all subjects; and the

well-known delineation of the vague country, in Homer or Hesiod,

one's best attainable mental outfit, for the journey thither. With

this sort of quiet wisdom the whole play is penetrated. Euripides

has said, or seemed to say, many things concerning Greek religion, at

variance with received opinion; and now, in the end of life, he

desires to make his peace--what shall at any rate be peace with men.

He is in the mood for acquiescence, or even for a palinode; and this

takes the direction, partly of mere submission to, partly of a

refining upon, the authorised religious tradition: he calmly

sophisticates this or that element of it which had seemed grotesque;

and has, like any modern writer, a theory how myths were made, and

how in lapse of time their first signification gets to be obscured

among mortals; and what he submits to, that he will also adorn

fondly, by his genius for words.

 

And that very neighbourhood afforded him his opportunity. It was in

the neighbourhood of Pella, the Macedonian capital, that the worship

of Dionysus, the newest of the gods, prevailed in its most

extravagant form--the [56] Thiasus, or wild, nocturnal procession of

Bacchic women, retired to the woods and hills for that purpose, with

its accompaniments of music, and lights, and dancing. Rational and

moderate Athenians, as we may gather from some admissions of

Euripides himself, somewhat despised all that; while those who were

more fanatical forsook the home celebrations, and went on pilgrimage

from Attica to Cithaeron or Delphi. But at Pella persons of high

birth took part in the exercise, and at a later period we read in

Plutarch how Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, was devoted

to this enthusiastic worship. Although in one of Botticelli's

pictures the angels dance very sweetly, and may represent many

circumstances actually recorded in the Hebrew scriptures, yet we

hardly understand the dance as a religious ceremony; the bare mention

of it sets us thinking on some fundamental differences between the

pagan religions and our own. It is to such ecstasies, however, that

all nature-worship seems to tend; that giddy, intoxicating sense of

spring--that tingling in the veins, sympathetic with the yearning

life of the earth, having, apparently, in all times and places,

prompted some mode of wild dancing. Coleridge, in one of his

fantastic speculations, refining on the German word for enthusiasm--

Schwärmerei, swarming, as he says, "like the swarming of bees

together"--has explained how the sympathies of mere numbers, as such,

the random catching on [57] fire of one here and another there, when

people are collected together, generates as if by mere contact, some

new and rapturous spirit, not traceable in the individual units of a

multitude. Such swarming was the essence of that strange dance of

the Bacchic women: literally like winged things, they follow, with

motives, we may suppose, never quite made clear even to themselves,

their new, strange, romantic god. Himself a woman-like god,--it was

on women and feminine souls that his power mainly fell. At Elis, it

was the women who had their own little song with which at spring-time

they professed to call him from the sea: at Brasiae they had their

own temple where none but women might enter; and so the Thiasus,

also, is almost exclusively formed of women--of those who experience

most directly the influence of things which touch thought through the

senses--the presence of night, the expectation of morning, the

nearness of wild, unsophisticated, natural things--the echoes, the

coolness, the noise of frightened creatures as they climbed through

the darkness, the sunrise seen from the hill-tops, the disillusion,

the bitterness of satiety, the deep slumber which comes with the

morning. Athenians visiting the Macedonian capital would hear, and

from time to time actually see, something of a religious custom, in

which the habit of an earlier world might seem to survive. As they

saw the lights flitting over the mountains, [58] and heard the wild,

sharp cries of the women, there was presented, as a singular fact in

the more prosaic actual life of a later time, an enthusiasm otherwise

relegated to the wonderland of a distant past, in which a supposed

primitive harmony and understanding between man and nature renewed

itself. Later sisters of Centaur and Amazon, the Maenads, as they

beat the earth in strange sympathy with its waking up from sleep, or

as, in the description of the Messenger, in the play of Euripides,

they lie sleeping in the glen, revealed among the morning mists, were

themselves indeed as remnants--flecks left here and there and not yet

quite evaporated under the hard light of a later and commoner day--of

a certain cloud-world which had once covered all things with a veil

of mystery. Whether or not, in what was often probably coarse as

well as extravagant, there may have lurked some finer vein of ethical

symbolism, such as Euripides hints at--the soberer influence, in the

Thiasus, of keen air and animal expansion, certainly, for art, and a

poetry delighting in colour and form, it was a custom rich in

suggestion. The imitative arts would draw from it altogether new

motives of freedom and energy, of freshness in old forms. It is from

this fantastic scene that the beautiful wind-touched draperies, the

rhythm, the heads suddenly thrown back, of many a Pompeian wall-

painting and sarcophagus-frieze are originally derived; and that

melting languor, that perfectly [59] composed lassitude of the fallen

Maenad, became a fixed type in the school of grace, the school of

Praxiteles.

 

The circumstances of the place thus combining with his peculiar

motive, Euripides writes the Bacchanals. It is this extravagant

phase of religion, and the latest-born of the gods, which as an

amende honorable to the once slighted traditions of Greek belief, he

undertakes to interpret to an audience composed of people who, like

Scyles, the Hellenising king of Scythia, feel the attraction of Greek

religion and Greek usage, but on their quainter side, and partly

relish that extravagance. Subject and audience alike stimulate the

romantic temper, and the tragedy of the Bacchanals, with its

innovations in metre and diction, expressly noted as foreign or

barbarous--all the charm and grace of the clear-pitched singing of

the chorus, notwithstanding--with its subtleties and sophistications,

its grotesques, mingled with and heightening a real shudder at the

horror of the theme, and a peculiarly fine and human pathos, is

almost wholly without the reassuring calm, generally characteristic

of the endings of Greek tragedy: is itself excited, troubled,

disturbing--a spotted or dappled thing, like the oddly dappled fawn-

skins of its own masquerade, so aptly expressive of the shifty,

twofold, rapidly-doubling genius of the divine, wild creature

himself. Let us listen and watch the strange masks coming and going,

for a while, [60] as far as may be as we should do with a modern

play. What are its charms? What is still alive, impressive, and

really poetical for us, in the dim old Greek play?

 

The scene is laid at Thebes, where the memory of Semele, the mother

of Dionysus, is still under a cloud. Her own sisters, sinning

against natural affection, pitiless over her pathetic death and

finding in it only a judgment upon the impiety with which, having

shamed herself with some mortal lover, she had thrown the blame of

her sin upon Zeus, have, so far, triumphed over her. The true and

glorious version of her story lives only in the subdued memory of the

two aged men, Teiresias the prophet, and her father Cadmus, apt now

to let things go loosely by, who has delegated his royal power to

Pentheus, the son of one of those sisters--a hot-headed and impious

youth. So things had passed at Thebes; and now a strange

circumstance has happened. An odd sickness has fallen upon the

women: Dionysus has sent the sting of his enthusiasm upon them, and

has pushed it to a sort of madness, a madness which imitates the true

Thiasus. Forced to have the form without the profit of his worship,

the whole female population, leaving distaff and spindle, and headed

by the three princesses, have deserted the town, and are lying

encamped on the bare rocks, or under the pines, among the solitudes

of Cithaeron. And it is just at this point that the divine child,

[61] supposed to have perished at his mother's side in the flames,

returns to his birthplace, grown to manhood.

 

Dionysus himself speaks the prologue. He is on a journey through the

world to found a new religion; and the first motive of this new

religion is the vindication of the memory of his mother. In

explaining this design, Euripides, who seeks always for pathetic

effect, tells in few words, touching because simple, the story of

Semele--here, and again still more intensely in the chorus which

follows--the merely human sentiment of maternity being not forgotten,

even amid the thought of the divine embraces of her fiery bed-fellow.

It is out of tenderness for her that the son's divinity is to be

revealed. A yearning affection, the affection with which we see him

lifting up his arms about her, satisfied at last, on an old Etruscan

metal mirror, has led him from place to place: everywhere he has had

his dances and established his worship; and everywhere his presence

has been her justification. First of all the towns in Greece he

comes to Thebes, the scene of her sorrows: he is standing beside the

sacred waters of Dirce and Ismenus: the holy place is in sight: he

hears the Greek speech, and sees at last the ruins of the place of

her lying-in, at once his own birth-chamber and his mother's tomb.

His image, as it detaches itself little by little from the episodes

of the play, and is further characterised by the [62] songs of the

chorus, has a singular completeness of symbolical effect. The

incidents of a fully developed human personality are superinduced on

the mystical and abstract essence of that fiery spirit in the flowing

veins of the earth--the aroma of the green world is retained in the

fair human body, set forth in all sorts of finer ethical lights and

shades--with a wonderful kind of subtlety. In the course of his long

progress from land to land, the gold, the flowers, the incense of the

East, have attached themselves deeply to him: their effect and

__EXPRESSION__ rest now upon his flesh like the gleaming of that old

ambrosial ointment of which Homer speaks as resting ever on the

persons of the gods, and cling to his clothing--the mitre binding his

perfumed yellow hair--the long tunic down to the white feet, somewhat

womanly, and the fawn-skin, with its rich spots, wrapped about the

shoulders. As the door opens to admit him, the scented air of the

vineyards (for the vine-blossom has an exquisite perfume) blows

through; while the convolvulus on his mystic rod represents all

wreathing flowery things whatever, with or without fruit, as in

America all such plants are still called vines. "Sweet upon the

mountains," the excitement of which he loves so deeply and to which

he constantly invites his followers--"sweet upon the mountains," and

profoundly amorous, his presence embodies all the voluptuous

abundance of Asia, its beating [63] sun, its "fair-towered cities,

full of inhabitants," which the chorus describe in their luscious

vocabulary, with the rich Eastern names--Lydia, Persia, Arabia Felix:

he is a sorcerer or an enchanter, the tyrant Pentheus thinks: the

springs of water, the flowing of honey and milk and wine, are his

miracles, wrought in person.

 

We shall see presently how, writing for that northern audience,

Euripides crosses the Theban with the gloomier Thracian legend, and

lets the darker stain show through. Yet, from the first, amid all

this floweriness, a touch or trace of that gloom is discernible. The

fawn-skin, composed now so daintily over the shoulders, may be worn

with the whole coat of the animal made up, the hoofs gilded and tied

together over the right shoulder, to leave the right arm disengaged

to strike, its head clothing the human head within, as Alexander, on

some of his coins, looks out from the elephant's scalp, and Hercules

out of the jaws of a lion, on the coins of Camarina. Those

diminutive golden horns attached to the forehead, represent not

fecundity merely, nor merely the crisp tossing of the waves of

streams, but horns of offence. And our fingers must beware of the

thyrsus, tossed about so wantonly by himself and his chorus. The

pine-cone at its top does but cover a spear-point; and the thing is a

weapon--the sharp spear of the hunter Zagreus--though hidden now by

the fresh leaves, and that button of pine-cone (useful also to dip in

[64] wine, to check the sweetness) which he has plucked down, coming

through the forest, at peace for a while this spring morning.

 

And the chorus emphasise this character, their songs weaving for the

whole piece, in words more effective than any painted scenery, a

certain congruous background which heightens all; the intimate sense

of mountains and mountain things being in this way maintained

throughout, and concentrated on the central figure. "He is sweet

among the mountains," they say, "when he drops down upon the plain,

out of his mystic musings"--and we may think we see the green

festoons of the vine dropping quickly, from foot-place to foot-place,

down the broken hill-side in spring, when like the Bacchanals, all

who can, wander out of the town to enjoy the earliest heats. "Let us

go out into the fields," we say; a strange madness seems to lurk

among the flowers, ready to lay hold on us also; autika ga pasa

choreusei+--soon the whole earth will dance and sing.

 

Dionysus is especially a woman's deity, and he comes from the east

conducted by a chorus of gracious Lydian women, his true sisters--

Bassarids, clad like himself in the long tunic, or bassara. They

move and speak to the music of clangorous metallic instruments,

cymbals and tambourines, relieved by the clearer notes of the pipe;

and there is a strange variety of almost imitative sounds for such

music, in their very [65] words. The Homeric hymn to Demeter

precedes the art of sculpture, but is rich in suggestions for it;

here, on the contrary, in the first chorus of the Bacchanals, as

elsewhere in the play, we feel that the poetry of Euripides is

probably borrowing something from art; that in these choruses, with

their repetitions and refrains, he is reproducing perhaps the spirit

of some sculptured relief which, like Luca della Robbia's celebrated

work for the organ-loft of the cathedral of Florence, worked by

various subtleties of line, not in the lips and eyes only, but in the

drapery and hands also, to a strange reality of impression of musical

effect on visible things.

 

They beat their drums before the palace; and then a humourous little

scene, a reflex of the old Dionysiac comedy--of that laughter which

was an essential element of the earliest worship of Dionysus--follows

the first chorus. The old blind prophet Teiresias, and the aged king

Cadmus, always secretly true to him, have agreed to celebrate the

Thiasus, and accept his divinity openly. The youthful god has

nowhere said decisively that he will have none but young men in his

sacred dance. But for that purpose they must put on the long tunic,

and that spotted skin which only rustics wear, and assume the thyrsus

and ivy-crown. Teiresias arrives and is seen knocking at the doors.

And then, just as in the medieval mystery, comes the [66] inevitable

grotesque, not unwelcome to our poet, who is wont in his plays,

perhaps not altogether consciously, to intensify by its relief both

the pity and the terror of his conceptions. At the summons of

Teiresias, Cadmus appears, already arrayed like him in the appointed

ornaments, in all their odd contrast with the infirmity and staidness

of old age. Even in old men's veins the spring leaps again, and they

are more than ready to begin dancing. But they are shy of the

untried dress, and one of them is blind--poi dei choreuein; poi

kathistanai poda; kai krata seisai polion;+ and then the difficulty

of the way! the long, steep journey to the glens! may pilgrims boil

their peas? might they proceed to the place in carriages? At last,

while the audience laugh more or less delicately at their aged

fumblings, in some co-operative manner, the eyes of the one combining

with the hands of the other, the pair are about to set forth.

 

Here Pentheus is seen approaching the palace in extreme haste. He

has been absent from home, and returning, has just heard of the state

of things at Thebes--the strange malady of the women, the dancings,

the arrival of the mysterious stranger: he finds all the women

departed from the town, and sees Cadmus and Teiresias in masque.

Like the exaggerated diabolical figures in some of the religious

plays and imageries of the Middle Age, he is an impersonation of

stupid impiety, one of those whom the gods willing to [67] destroy

first infatuate. Alternating between glib unwisdom and coarse

mockery, between violence and a pretence of moral austerity, he

understands only the sorriest motives; thinks the whole thing

feigned, and fancies the stranger, so effeminate, so attractive of

women with whom he remains day and night, but a poor sensual

creature, and the real motive of the Bacchic women the indulgence of

their lust; his ridiculous old grandfather he is ready to renounce,

and accuses Teiresias of having in view only some fresh source of

professional profit to himself in connexion with some new-fangled

oracle; his petty spite avenges itself on the prophet by an order to

root up the sacred chair, where he sits to watch the birds for

divination, and disturb the order of his sacred place; and even from

the moment of his entrance the mark of his doom seems already set

upon him, in an impotent trembling which others notice in him. Those

of the women who still loitered, he has already caused to be shut up

in the common prison; the others, with Ino, Autonoe, and his own

mother, Agave, he will hunt out of the glens; while the stranger is

threatened with various cruel forms of death. But Teiresias and

Cadmus stay to reason with him, and induce him to abide wisely with

them; the prophet fittingly becomes the interpreter of Dionysus, and

explains the true nature of the visitor; his divinity, the completion

or counterpart of that of Demeter; his gift of prophecy; [68] all the

soothing influences he brings with him; above all, his gift of the

medicine of sleep to weary mortals. But the reason of Pentheus is

already sickening, and the judicial madness gathering over it.

Teiresias and Cadmus can but "go pray." So again, not without the

laughter of the audience, supporting each other a little grotesquely

against a fall, they get away at last.

 

And then, again, as in those quaintly carved and coloured imageries

of the Middle Age--the martyrdom of the youthful Saint Firmin, for

instance, round the choir at Amiens--comes the full contrast, with a

quite medieval simplicity and directness, between the insolence of

the tyrant, now at last in sight of his prey, and the outraged beauty

of the youthful god, meek, surrounded by his enemies, like some fair

wild creature in the snare of the hunter. Dionysus has been taken

prisoner; he is led on to the stage, with his hands bound, but still

holding the thyrsus. Unresisting he had submitted himself to his

captors; his colour had not changed; with a smile he had bidden them

do their will, so that even they are touched with awe, and are almost

ready to admit his divinity. Marvellously white and red, he stands

there; and now, unwilling to be revealed to the unworthy, and

requiring a fitness in the receiver, he represents himself, in answer

to the inquiries of Pentheus, not as Dionysus, but simply as the

god's prophet, [69] in full trust in whom he desires to hear his

sentence. Then the long hair falls to the ground under the shears;

the mystic wand is torn from his hand, and he is led away to be tied

up, like some dangerous wild animal, in a dark place near the king's

stables.

 

Up to this point in the play, there has been a noticeable ambiguity

as to the person of Dionysus, the main figure of the piece; he is in

part Dionysus, indeed; but in part, only his messenger, or minister

preparing his way; a certain harshness of effect in the actual

appearance of a god upon the stage being in this way relieved, or

made easy, as by a gradual revelation in two steps. To Pentheus, in

his invincible ignorance, his essence remains to the last unrevealed,

and even the women of the chorus seem to understand in him, so far,

only the forerunner of their real leader. As he goes away bound,

therefore, they too, threatened also in their turn with slavery,

invoke his greater original to appear and deliver them. In pathetic

cries they reproach Thebes for rejecting them--ti m' anainei, ti me

pheugeis;+ yet they foretell his future greatness; a new Orpheus, he

will more than renew that old miraculous reign over animals and

plants. Their song is full of suggestions of wood and river. It is

as if, for a moment, Dionysus became the suffering vine again; and

the rustle of the leaves and water come through their words to

refresh it. The [70] fountain of Dirce still haunted by the virgins

of Thebes, where the infant god was cooled and washed from the flecks

of his fiery birth, becomes typical of the coolness of all springs,

and is made, by a really poetic licence, the daughter of the distant

Achelous--the earliest born, the father in myth, of all Greek rivers.

 

A giddy sonorous scene of portents and surprises follows--a distant,

exaggerated, dramatic reflex of that old thundering tumult of the

festival in the vineyard--in which Dionysus reappears, miraculously

set free from his bonds. First, in answer to the deep-toned

invocation of the chorus, a great voice is heard from within,

proclaiming him to be the son of Semele and Zeus. Then, amid the

short, broken, rapturous cries of the women of the chorus,

proclaiming him master, the noise of an earthquake passes slowly; the

pillars of the palace are seen waving to and fro; while the strange,

memorial fire from the tomb of Semele blazes up and envelopes the

whole building. The terrified women fling themselves on the ground;

and then, at last, as the place is shaken open, Dionysus is seen

stepping out from among the tottering masses of the mimic palace,

bidding them arise and fear not. But just here comes a long pause in

the action of the play, in which we must listen to a messenger newly

arrived from the glens, to tell us what he has seen there, among the

Maenads. The singular, somewhat sinister beauty of this speech, and

a [71] similar one subsequent--a fair description of morning on the

mountain-tops, with the Bacchic women sleeping, which turns suddenly

to a hard, coarse picture of animals cruelly rent--is one of the

special curiosities which distinguish this play; and, as it is wholly

narrative, I shall give it in English prose, abbreviating, here and

there, some details which seem to have but a metrical value:--

 

"I was driving my herd of cattle to the summit of the scaur to feed,

what time the sun sent forth his earliest beams to warm the earth.

And lo! three companies of women, and at the head of one of them

Autonoe, thy mother Agave at the head of the second, and Ino at the

head of the third. And they all slept, with limbs relaxed, leaned

against the low boughs of the pines, or with head thrown heedlessly

among the oak-leaves strewn upon the ground--all in the sleep of

temperance, not, as thou saidst, pursuing Cypris through the

solitudes of the forest, drunken with wine, amid the low rustling of the lotus-pipe.