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STUDIES IN THE POETRY OF ITALY

PART I

THE DRAMA

"Whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own features, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."

When Greece was at the height of her glory, and Greek literature was in its flower; when AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, all within two brilliant generations, were holding the polite world under the magic spell of their dramatic art, their rough and almost unknown Roman neighbors were just emerging from tradition into history. There the atmosphere was altogether one of struggle. The king-ruled Romans, long oppressed, had at last swept away that crumbling kingdom, and established upon its ruins the young republic; the unconsidered masses, still oppressed, were just heaving themselves up into legal recognition, and had already obtained their tribunes, and a little later the boon of a published law--the famous Law of the Twelve Tables, the first Roman code.

Three years before this, and in preparation for it, a committee of three Roman statesmen, the so-called triumvirs, had gone to Athens to study the laws of Solon. This visit was made in 454 B. C. AEschylus had died two years before; Sophocles had become famous, and Euripides had just brought out his first play. As those three Romans sat in the theater at Athens, beneath the open sky, surrounded by the cultured and pleasure-loving Greeks, as they listened to the impassioned lines of the popular favorite, unable to understand except for the actor's art--what a contrast was presented between these two nations which had as yet never crossed each other's paths, but which were destined to come together at last in mutual conquest. The grounds and prophecy of this conquest were even now present. The Roman triumvirs came to learn Greek law, and they learned it so well that they became lawgivers not alone for Greece but for all the world; the triumvirs felt that day the charm of Greek art, and this was but a premonition of that charm which fell more masterfully upon Rome in later years, and took her literature and all kindred arts completely captive.

Still from that day, for centuries to come, the Romans had sterner business than the cultivation of the arts of peace. They had themselves and Italy to conquer; they had a still unshaped state to establish; they had their ambitions, growing as their power increased, to gratify; they had jealous neighbors in Greece, Africa, and Gaul to curb. In such rough, troubled soil as this, literature could not take root and flourish. They were not, it is true, without the beginnings of native literature. Their religious worship inspired rude hymns to their gods; their generals, coming home, inscribed the records of their victory in rough Saturnian verse on commemorative tablets; there were ballads at banquets, and dirges at funerals. Also the natural mimicry of the Italian peasantry had no doubt for ages indulged itself in uncouth performances of a dramatic nature, which developed later into those mimes and farces, the forerunners of native Roman comedy and the old Medley-Satura. Yet in these centuries Rome knew no letters worthy of the name save the laws on which she built her state; no arts save the arts of war.

But in her course of Italian conquest, she had finally come into conflict with those Greek colonists who had long since been taking peaceful possession of Italy along the southeastern border. These Graeco-Roman struggles in Italy, which arose in consequence, culminated in the fall of Tarentum, B. C. 272; and with this victory the conquest of the Italian peninsula was complete.

This event meant much for the development of Italian literature; it meant new impulse and opportunity--the impulse of close and quickening contact with Greek thought, and the opportunity afforded by the internal calm consequent upon the completed subjugation of Italy. Joined with these two influences was a third which came with the end of the first Punic War, a generation afterward. Rome has now taken her first fateful step toward world empire; she has leaped across Sicily and set victorious foot in Africa; has successfully met her first great foreign enemy. The national pride and exaltation consequent upon this triumph gave favorable atmosphere and encouragement for those impulses which had already been stirred.

His first public work, to which we have referred above, was the production of a play; but whether tragedy or comedy we do not know. It was at any rate, without doubt, a translation into the crude, unpolished, and heavy Latin of his time, from some Greek original. His tragedies, of which only forty-one lines of fragments, representing nine plays, have come down to us, are all on Greek subjects, and are probably only translations or bald imitations of the Greek originals.

The example set by Andronicus was followed by four Romans of marked ability, whose life and work form a continuous chain of literary activity from Naevius, who was but a little younger than Andronicus, and who brought out his first play in 235 B. C.; through Ennius, who first established tragedy upon a firm foundation in Rome; through Pacuvius, the nephew of Ennius and his worthy successor, to the death of Accius in 94 B. C., who was the last and greatest of the old Roman tragedians.

While these tragedies were Greek in subject and form, it is not at all necessary to suppose that they were servile imitations or translations merely of the Greek originals. The Romans did undoubtedly impress their national spirit upon that which they borrowed, in tragedy just as in all things else. Indeed, the great genius of Rome consisted partly in this--her wonderful power to absorb and assimilate material from every nation with which she came in contact. Rome might borrow, but what she had borrowed she made her own completely, for better or for worse. The resulting differences between Greek literature and a Hellenized Roman literature would naturally be the differences between the Greek and Roman type of mind. Where the Greek was naturally religious and contemplative, the Roman was practical and didactic. He was grave and intense, fond of exalted ethical effects, appeals to national pride; and above all, insisted that nothing should offend that exaggerated sense of both personal and national dignity which characterized the Roman everywhere.

We shall not weary the reader with quotations from the extant fragments of old Roman tragedy, fragments which, isolated as they are, can prove next to nothing as to the development of the plot or the other essential characteristics of a drama. A play is not like an animal: it cannot be reconstructed from a single fragment. It will be profitable, however, to dwell upon a few of these fragments, in order to get some idea of the nature and contents of all that is left of an extensive literature.

Here it is; here, the torch, wrapped in fire and blood. Many years it hath lain hid; help, citizens, and extinguish it. For now, on the great sea, a swift fleet is gathering. It hurries along a host of calamities. They come: a fierce host lines the shores with sail-winged ships.

Sellar.

Miller.

When we read this delightful passage, and then turn to the exquisite and fuller pictures of natural beauty which Lucretius and Vergil have left us, we shall agree that Accius was himself indeed the "harbinger of burning rays."

These plays are of especial interest to us, aside from their intrinsic value, for the triple reason that they are the sole representatives of Roman tragedy preserved entire, that they reflect the literary complexion of the artificial age in which they were produced, and that they had so large an influence in shaping the early English drama. They are, in fact, the stepping-stone between ancient and modern, Greek and English, drama.

As to their style, even a cursory reading reveals their extreme declamatory nature, the delight of the author in the horrible and weird, the pains he has taken to select from the Greek sources the most harrowing of all the tales as the foundation of his tragedies, the boldness with which he has broken over the time-honored rule that deeds of blood should not be done upon the stage, and his fondness for abstruse mythological allusions. Add to these features the dreary prolixity with which the author spoils many of his descriptive passages, protracting them often into veritable catalogues of places and things, also his frequent exaggerations and repetitions, and we have the chief defects of these tragedies.

And yet they have equally marked excellences. They abound in brilliant epigrams, graphic descriptions, touching pathos, magnificent passion, subtile analysis of character and motive. But when all is said, it must be admitted that the plays, faults and virtues included, are highly rhetorical and artificial, such alone as that artificial age would be expected to produce.

Such as they were, and perhaps because they were what they were, the tragedies of Seneca, rather than the Greek plays, were the model for Italian, French, and early English tragedy. The first and obvious reason for this no doubt is the fact that the Middle Age of Europe was an age of Latin rather than of Greek scholarship, so far as popular scholarship was concerned. And this made Seneca rather than Euripides available. But it is also probable that his style and spirit appealed strongly to those later-day imitators. So great, indeed, was the popularity of Seneca's tragedies in the early Elizabethan age, that he might be said to have monopolized the attention of writers of that time. He was a favorite with the schools as a classical text-book, as old Roger Ascham testifies; and his works were translated entire into English then for the first time by five English scholars, and collected into a single volume in 1581 by Thomas Newton, one of the translators.

In addition to the version of 1581, the tragedies of Seneca were again translated into English by Glover in 1761. Since that date no English version was attempted until the present writer a few years ago undertook the task again, and produced a metrical version of three of these plays.

Although the play is confined in time to the final day of catastrophe at Corinth, the background is the whole romantic story of the Argonauts: how Jason and his hero-comrades, at the instigation of Pelias, the usurping king of Thessalian Iolchos, undertook the first voyage in quest of the golden fleece; how after many adventures these first sailors reached the kingdom of AE?tes, who jealously guarded the fleece, since upon its possession depended his own kingship; how the three deadly labors were imposed upon Jason before the fleece could be won; how, smitten by love of him, the beautiful, barbaric Medea, daughter of the king, by the help of her magic, aided Jason in all his labors and accompanied him in his flight; how, to retard her father's pursuit, she slew her brother and scattered his mangled remains in the path as she fled; how again, for love of Jason, she restored his father to youth, and tricked Pelias' own daughters into slaying their aged sire; how, for this act, Medea and her husband were exiled from Thessaly and went and dwelt in Corinth; how, for ten happy years, she lived with her husband and two sons in this alien land, her wild past almost forgotten, her magic untouched. But now Jason has been gradually won away from his wife, and is about to wed Cre?sa, the daughter of Creon, king of Corinth. The wedding festivities have already begun, when the play opens and reveals Medea invoking all the powers of heaven and hell in punishment of her false lord.

Into her frenzied and dreadful imprecations breaks the sound of sweet voices from without of a chorus of Corinthian women, chanting the epithalamium for the nuptials of Jason and Cre?sa.

Hearing this cruel song in praise of her rival and of her false husband, Medea goes into a wilder passion of rage. Medea's old nurse tries to soothe her mistress and recall her to her right mind by wise saws and prudent philosophy. But the flood of passion will not be checked.

But lo, she comes with fierce and threatening mien to seek An audience with us. Slaves! defend us from her touch And pestilential presence! Bid her silence keep, And learn at length obedience to the king's Commands.

Go, speed thy flight, thou thing of evil, fell And monstrous!

Creon claims to have been merciful in having shielded Jason and Medea all these years from the just resentment of the king of Thessaly. Jason's cause would be easy enough to defend, for he has been innocent of guilt; but it is impossible longer to shield Medea, who has committed so many bloody deeds in the past, and is capable of doing the like again.

Creon goes out toward his palace. Medea remains gazing darkly after him for a few moments, and then takes her way in the opposite direction.

But Medea hastens by without answering or noticing her. The nurse, looking after her, reflects in deep distress:

As some wild bacchanal, whose fury's raging fire The god inflames, now roams distraught on Pindus' snows, And now on lofty Nysa's rugged slopes; so she Now here, now there, with frenzied step is hurried on, Her face revealing every mark of stricken woe, With flushing cheek and sighs deep drawn, wild cries and tears, And laughter worse than tears. In her a medley strange Of doubts and fears is seen, and overtopping wrath, Bewailings, bitter groans of anguish.--Whither tends This overburdened soul? What mean her frenzied threats? When will the foaming wave of fury spend itself? No common crime, I fear, no easy deed of ill She meditates. Herself she will outvie. For well I recognize the wonted marks of rage. Some deed Is threatening, wild, profane and hideous. Behold, Her face betrays her madness. O ye gods, may these Our fears prove vain forebodings!

Our own imaginations and our fears keep pace with those of the devoted nurse, and we listen in fearful silence while Medea, communing with her tortured soul, reveals the depth of suffering and hate into which she has been plunged.

But this wild rage can lead nowhere. She struggles to calm her terrible passion to still more terrible reason and resolve.

Will Jason say He feared the power of Creon and Acastus' wrath?-- True love is proof against the fear of man. But grant He was compelled to yield, and pledged his hand in fear: He might at least have sought his wife with one last word Of comfort and farewell. But this, though brave in heart, He feared to do. The cruel terms of banishment Could Creon's son-in-law not soften? No. One day Alone was given for last farewell to both my babes. But time's short space I'll not bewail; though brief in hours, In consequence it stretches out eternally. This day shall see a deed that ne'er shall be forgot.-- But now I'll go and pray the gods, and move high heaven But I shall work my will!

As Medea hastens from the scene, Jason himself enters; and now we hear from his own lips the fatal dilemma in which he finds himself. Regard for his marriage vows, love for his children, and fear of death at the hands of Creon--all are at variance and must be faced. It is the usual tragedy of fate.

But Medea's passion has for the moment spent itself. She is now no sorceress, no mad woman breathing out dreadful threatenings; but only the forsaken wife, indignant, indeed, but pathetic in her appeals for sympathy and help from him for whose sake she had given up all her maiden glory, and broken every tie that held her to the past. Her quiet self-control is in marked contrast to her recent ravings.

And now again we have a situation which only the quick, sharp flashes, the clash of words like steel on steel, can relieve. Here is no chance for long periods, nor flights of oratory; but sentences as short and sharp as swords, flashes of feeling, stinging epigrams.

Here, apparently, is the first suggestion to Medea of the most terrible part of the revenge which she was to take upon Jason. The obvious revenge upon Creon and his daughter, as well as upon her husband, Medea had already foreshadowed in her opening words; but her deadly passion had not yet been aimed at her children. It is true that twice she had bitterly renounced them, once to the nurse, and again but now to Jason himself, since they were Jason's also, and were likely now to be brothers to the sons of her hated rival; nevertheless her mother-love still is strong. But now, by Jason's unfortunate emphasis upon the love he bears his sons, she sees a chance to obtain that measure of revenge which in her heart she has already resolved to find. And yet this thought is so terrible to her that, even though we see her shape her present course in reference to it, it is evident that she gives it no more than a subconscious existence.

But now she resolves to conceal her purposes of revenge and overcome Jason with guile, and thus addresses him:

At least ere I depart Grant me this last request: let me once more embrace My sons. E'en that small boon will comfort my sad heart. And this my latest prayer to thee: if, in my grief, My tongue was over-bold, let not my words remain To rankle in thy heart. Remember happier things Of me, and let my bitter words be straight forgot.

Jason is completely deceived, as Creon had been, by Medea's seeming humility, as if, indeed, a passionate nature like hers, inflamed by wrongs like hers, could be restrained and tamed by a few calm words of advice! He says:

Not one shall linger in my soul; and curb, I pray, Thy too impetuous heart, and gently yield to fate. For resignation ever soothes the woful soul.

Do thou, my faithful nurse, the comrade of my grief, And all the devious wanderings of my checkered course, Assist me now in these my plans. There is a robe, The glory of our Colchian realm, the precious gift Of Phoebus' self to King AE?tes as a proof Of fatherhood; a gleaming circlet, too, all wrought With threads of gold, the yellow gold bespangled o'er With gems, a fitting crown to deck a princess' head. These treasures let Medea's children bear as gifts To Jason's bride. But first imbue them with the power Of magic, and invoke the aid of Hecate; The woe-producing sacrifices then prepare, And let the sacred flames through all our courts resound.

The chorus, which is supposed to be present throughout the play, an interested though inactive witness of all that passes, has already been seen to be a partisan of Jason, and hostile to Medea. It now sings a choral interlude opening on the text "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," and continuing with a prayer for Jason's safety. It then recounts the individual history of Jason's companions subsequent to the Argonautic expedition, showing how almost all came to an untimely end. These might indeed be said to have deserved their fate, for they volunteered to assist in that first impious voyage in quest of the golden fleece; but Jason should be spared the general doom, for the task had been imposed upon him by his usurping uncle, Pelias.

As the next scene opens, the old nurse voices the feeling that we all have upon the eve of some expected but unknown horror.

My spirit trembles, for I feel the near approach Of some unseen disaster. Swiftly grows her grief, Its own fires kindling; and again her passion's force Hath leaped to life. I oft have seen her, with the fit Of inspiration in her soul, confront the gods, And force the very heavens to her will. But now, A monstrous deed of greater moment far than these Medea is preparing. For, but now, did she With step of frenzy hurry off until she reached Her stricken home. There, in her chamber, all her stores Of magic wonders are revealed; once more she views The things herself hath held in fear these many years, Unloosing one by one her ministers of ill, Occult, unspeakable, and wrapt in mystery.

We omit the remainder of the nurse's speech out of regard for Seneca's reputation as an artist, for in a long passage of sixty lines he proceeds to scour heaven, earth, and the waters under the earth, for every form of venomous serpent, noxious herb, and dread, uncanny thing that the mind of man can conceive; and by the time he has his full array of horrors marshaled before us, we have grown so familiar with the gruesome things that we cease to shiver at them. But at last the ingredients for the hell-broth are ready.

These deadly, potent herbs she takes and sprinkles o'er With serpent venom, mixing all; and in the broth She mingles unclean birds, a wailing screech-owl's heart, A ghastly vampire's vitals torn from living flesh. Her magic poisons all she ranges for her use: The ravening power of hidden fire is held in these, While deep in others lurks the numbing chill of frost. Now magic runes she adds, more potent far. But lo! Her voice resounds, and as with maddened step she comes She chants her charms, while heaven and earth convulsive rock.

Medea now enters, chanting her incantations. Madness has done fearful work with her in the last few hours. We see at a glance that she has indeed, as the nurse has told us, gone back to

The things herself hath held in fear these many years,

and has been changed from a true wife and loving mother to a wild and murderous witch once more. She calls upon the gods of the underworld, the silent throng from the dark world of spirits, the tormented shades, all to come to her present aid. She recounts her miraculous powers over nature which she has used aforetime, and which are still in her grasp.

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