times and for different audiences, coincide in their conception of life. Theognis addresses his friend thus: 'Endure in misfortune since thou hast joy of good things when fate came upon thee to have those things. As thou hast received evil after good so now pray to the gods and seek to escape from it.' And again: 'Danger lies in wait upon every action, and no man knows at the beginning of a deed where it will end.' 'No man can obtain all that he desires, for the barriers of grievous helplessness restrain him.' And Pindar in his grand hierophantic manner: 'Up and down the hopes of men are tossed as they cleave the waves of baffling falsity. A sure token of what shall come to pass hath never any man on the earth received from God: the divinations of things to come are blind. Many the chances that fall to men, when they look not for them, sometimes to thwart delight, yet others after battling with the surge of sorrowful pain have suddenly received for their affliction some happiness profound.' And in Herodotus we read: 'There is a wheel on which the affairs of men revolve, and its movement forbids the same man always to be fortunate.' My wish for myself and those I love is to be now successful and now to meet with a check, thus passing through life amid alternate good and ill rather than with perpetual good fortune.' 'It is well to bear in mind that chances rule men and not men chances.' 'There never will be a man who was not liable to misfortunes from the day of his birth, and those misfortunes greater in proportion to his own greatness.'†

Such would seem to be the ordinary Greek conception of life. How can it be said to be tragic? We must first of all get rid of the idea that life as tragic must end in violent death or great suffering. The practice of Tragedy in the fifth century, so far as we know it, does not demand an unhappy ending. Nor does it mean that ordinary life was lived on the same serious, large, and complete scale. It means that man has a natural delight in life, and a strong spring of action in himself so that he lives and acts freely unconstrained by the exact knowledge of his limitations. He is conscious of life as a final reality to be accepted by itself and not as part of a wider

* Pindar, Ode XII (Myers).

† Herodotus, I, 207; III, 40; VII, 49, 203 (Rawlinson).

scheme of things. The same meanings and values are attached to the facts of life, for the hero on the stage and for the spectator when he has left the theatre. The curve of the tragic hero's existence may rise higher, but it starts from the same point and descends to the same point as that of the ordinary man, and rests upon the same base. And that base is composed of the simple facts of life on the earth as they finally arrange themselves in man's mature experience, as something hard and sorrowful and precarious, whose brightness is at the best short-lived, and must fade away into old age, if it is not suddenly quenched long before by the blind stroke of death. This or something very like it is what we mean when we say that the ordinary Greek attitude to life in serious moments was tragic, and it corresponds closely with the views of life so frequently occurring in Sophocles' tragedies, which are themselves illustrated by the movement of his plays.

The citizen of a modern state, enveloped in a monotonous security by an efficient service of police and taxation and public works, comforted and assisted in a peaceful career by the inventions of science and the conveniences of civilisation, solaced by a religion which is not of this world and which finds the real life in a spiritual world within the material one, is able with difficulty to realise how exposed to occasions of fear and pity was the ordinary life of the Greeks. The safeguards and alleviations of life which we take for granted were unknown to them. Society was unstable; the ways of life on land and sea were full of danger; poverty and helplessness were never far away. The weakness and insufficiency of the body to win a livelihood were no less clear to them than its inevitable decay into old age and death or its sudden collapse from disease. Everywhere they seemed subject to circumstances or powers which were hostile and jealous. The very brilliance of the Greek achievement, the austere perfection of the artistic remains from the fifth century, help to blind us to the conditions under which their work was done. Literature from Homer onwards contains ample evidence of all that the Greeks found to fear and pity in human destiny. Nought feebler doth the Earth nurture than man, of all the creatures that

breathe upon the face of the earth.' Theognis calls those men fools who pity the dead rather than the living, whose life and vigour pass away so quickly. Man's boasted knowledge is but delusion: his real good or woe he is unable to foresee. Witless are you mortals and dull to foresee your lot, whether of good or evil,' says Demeter in the Homeric Hymn. In the memorable scene after the Persian review at Abydos between Xerxes and Artabanus, who beneath their Persian names are real Greeks, Xerxes wept when he considered the brief life of the vast host gathered under his command, but Artabanus reminded him that the troubles and diseases of humanity made even that brief span intolerable. Envy, factions, strife, battles, and slaughters; and last of all age claims him for her own, age dispraised, infirm, unsociable, unfriended, with whom all woe of woe abides,' and then the doom of Hades even Death at the last.' Such is the catalogue drawn up by Sophocles ending with death, the last great fear, of which we hear in the 'Phædo' that all men except philosophers count death among the great evils and the brave who endure it, endure it only from fear of greater evils.' And in accordance with this attitude Phædo regards it as an extraordinary thing that he did not feel pity for Socrates during the closing hours of his life. For as Aristotle remarks, 'what men find fearful in their own case, is pitiable when it happens to others.'

And yet this continual intrusion of fear and pity did not quench their spirit. There is something very wonderful about the steady nerve and balance of the Athenians during the fifth century. But this balance of spirit was not merely a happy gift of disposition. In the Funeral Oration alluding to the religious sacrifices and festivals of the city, Pericles says that the delight we draw from these things drives away sadness, or 'melancholy,' according to Jowett's translation. To a people so occupied with making their world and living in it, so acutely conscious of the nature of human experience, so entirely dependent on themselves for power to act and endure, the spectacle of tragedy can hardly have been only an artistic or pleasurable one. The expression Art for Art's sake would have been incomprehensible in Athens at that time, and to associate

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pleasure in the ordinary sense of the word with the tragedies of Eschylus or Sophocles seems like trifling with sacred things. Aristotle, when using the word 'pleasure' of the tragic effect, qualifies it with an adjective meaning 'peculiar' or 'proper.' The theme of tragedy lay much too close to the central issue of the audience's life to be regarded simply as a source of pleasure or to be observed in the detached way that a work of art demands. Greek tragedy did not aim at the presentation of this or that character or group of persons. The spectators were not meant to detect themselves in the characters on the stage or to delight in their truth to life. To think only of the hero's or heroine's character in the play, not to realise, for instance, that Creon's fortunes are as important as Antigone's in the play of Sophocles, is to fail to appreciate the significance of Greek Tragedy; for it is not a representation of men but of a piece of action, of life, of happiness and unhappiness, which come under the head of action, and the end aimed at is the representation not of qualities of character but of some action; and while character makes men what they are, it is the scenes they act in that make them happy or the opposite.' Happiness and unhappiness in this life is the theme of tragedy, and it is the final end of action in ordinary life. Such things belong to the deepest and most serious part of man's nature, his moral and religious conscience, and their dramatic representation works on those feelings through the aesthetic sense to achieve for the Greek something similar to what such painters as Piero da Francesco and Giovanni Bellini do for the believing Christian.

The figures and scenes of those painters are solemn and inspiring but not with the heavenly radiance and joy of Angelico's saints and angels from whom all traces of 'this muddy vesture of decay' have vanished. The Madonnas and saints of Giovanni Bellini in particular have a full and real humanity. They are also ideal in the truest sense, 'of the world but not in it.' They have trodden the earth and know its life. They look out on the spectator with peace and power born not of innocence and seclusion from the world but of goodness and knowledge founded on experience. The types and scenes which Bellini creates are truly heroic and saintly, in

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which beauty of physical form and colour is penetrated and refined by the calmness of spiritual strength. They have the power to uplift, to purge, to reconcile. In them as in the greatest Greek tragedies æsthetic and moral powers are blended together to breathe joy in the midst of sorrow, that strange state so admirably expressed in Hölderlin's couplet on Sophocles:

'Viele versuchten umsonst das Freudigste freudig zu sagen. Hier spricht endlich es mir, hier in der Trauer, sich aus.'

The modern student may read or see a tragedy or at the best the Oresteia in a day, trying to make historical imagination and antiquarian knowledge do duty for the vividness and proximity of the original spectacle. During the City Dionysia the Athenians sat for many hours on three successive days in the theatre while nine tragedies were performed. The effect of such a performance must have been overwhelming. The modern world has nothing to offer on so great a scale. The nearest approach that we can make to it are the festival performances of Wagner's 'Ring' at Bayreuth. It can best be described as an immersion or saturation in the spirit of heroic life. During the performances the audience must have felt transported into a wider and grander world where they beheld the spectacle of human life with its sorrows and sufferings and death, its splendours and its eclipses, transfigured and redeemed from the narrow and broken perceptions of daily life by the artist's power and the consecration of religion. Those three days constituted for the spectator a tremendous evocation of the emotions of pity and fear. Each tragedy repeated in gigantic and solemn form not simply 'the doubtful doom of human kind,' but the fearful and piteous tale of life raised to a power exceeding that of ordinary humanity. And it was by his absorption into the pitiful and fearful incidents of the heroic world that the spectator had his own emotions of pity and fear 'purged.' His nerve, his confidence in life, shaken by his own experience of the world, is restored or strengthened by the hero's acquiescence in, and endurance of, that tragic rhythm of life which pulsates through past and present alike.

G. M. SARGEAUNT.