The Tragedies of Sophocles

Irish Jesuit Province

The Tragedies of SophoclesAuthor(s): George O'NeillSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 73, No. 868 (Oct., 1945), pp. 422-435Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20515431 .

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422

The Tragedies of Sophocles

By George O'Neill, S.J.

IT is the business of every artist to create and to speak.

He has to create ideals from the real world which he finds

around him; the impulse to do this is born within him.

He has to express those ideals in an instinctively-chosen

medium by virtue of a faculty that is partly innate,, partly the

product of training and discipline. The poet, William Ailing ham, has expressed the artist's vocation in words on which

we cannot improve :

What is the artist7s duty? His work, however wrought,

Shape, colour, word or tone, is to make better known

(Himself divinely taught) To praise and celebrate,

Because his love is great, The lovely miracle

Of Universal Beauty ; This message would he tell.

And if he deal perforce, With evil and with-pain, With horror and affright, He does it to our gain; Makes felt the mighty course

That sweepeth on amain,



THE TRAGEDIES OF SOPHOCLES 423

Planet4ike, smooth and severe,

Of law; whose atmosphere Is beauty and delight ; For these are at its source.

Am I starting too far away from our main subject, which

concerns Sophocles ? Not too far, I think ; indeed those words of* the Irish lyricist might suggest themselves more than once

in the course of our talk on the art and the stage of a noble luminary of the Attic drama.

Dramatic art stands in more than one respect apart from its

sister-arts. None of these is so obviously and appreciably meant

as is drama for the multitude?from even the humblest up to the loftiest of intellectual star-gazers. Its appeal comes to all, but "

'Tis mightiest in the mightiest'9. Again, it is a most

complex art; "

shape, colour, word or tone "

all combine to

bring about ijs perfection ; it is a yoke-fellow with poetry, paint ing, music, sculpture and architecture. It comprehends wide

varieties ; its forms, other than the highest, cannot be touched

on within the limits of this present discourse ; but it is not, therefore, intended to exclude the existence of art?works com

manded in their way, but lighter, more ephemeral, more toy

like, than those that chiefly exercise our judgment?the master

Works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare,

Corneille, Racine and some great names of Spain and Italy.

One aspect of great art has come to be specially associated with tragedy and it has won for itself celebrity under a Greek name. That name is "Katharsis ",

" Purification ". It has

come to us from that great teacher of many things, Aristotle ; unfortunately, his extant works never come to the point of

explaining what he meant to tell us. What he says is this?



424 THE IRISH MONTHLY

"the effect of tragedy is the purifying of the soul by pity and terror.yy

The best explanation of this saying which I have seen is one

expounded?not, of course, as a novelty?by my former col

league at Dublin in the teaching of English literature, Professor W. F. Trench. His view, put briefly in Studies, December, 1930, is this : ?

Harmony is the cure for discord. Distracting emotions are

purged away by soothing music, peace of mind is induced by the rendering of human experience in terms of rhythm and

melody. Art in general gives a rendering of experience in

terms of form?of what is felt to be orderly and satisfactory to

the mind. Now tragedy presents a general view of human life

and destiny, and largely of its darker aspects. To this it gives form by presenting it to our intelligence, heart and conscience

as rational and moral. If, for example, in the dramatic telling

of a great story like that of Oedipus or Lear we see that the

actions and sufferings of the personages and the treatment of

them and their destinies by the Higher Powers are on the whole

accordant with our sentiments of right and justice, then the

pity and fear excited by the painful events of the drama are 64

purged "

by a sense that a right conclusion has been reached.

We have se?n experience, which is of itself chaotic, reduced to

terms of order, and therefore we are at peace. In the case of

dramas that have what we call a "

happy ending "

this is easily seen ; we may mention as an example The Merchant of Venice

?supposing we are satisfied with Shakespeare's final disposal of

Shylock. In grimmer tragedy, such as King Lear or Othello, the principle will still be true, though it requires more discern

ment to* perceive and acknowledge it. But if, on the contrary,

the sorrows of the hero or the heroine appear to be nothing more than the results of blind chance?still more if they appear




(as in works by some pessimist fictionists like Thomas Hardy) to be cruel sport indulged in by some extra-human and inhuman

power, then there is no purification, no relief. We are weighed down by a sense of inexplicable wrong, by what Wordsworth

has called

the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world.

Such, then, is the function of drama. It is, in a word, to

rationalise and moralise experience ; to give form to life.

Drama may, indeed, fall short in various ways of the high demands made on it by reason and morals. It may none the

less possess power or beauty of a meretricious or even of a

genuine kind. But the soul cannot be left really satisfied by a

presentation of action and destiny that interprets them falsely, irrationally, immorally?and here reason and morals are felt, to

be one. It seems to be especially the function of tragedy, while

it is that of all high art, to display the rightness, the trend towards good, towards God, of a creation that seems so often

to have blundered away from God. In a passage worthy of a

great theme, Milton has exposed all this. In face of the stark

tragedy of Samson's life and death, he declares :

Nothing is hete to wtiil or knock the breast . . . nothing but what may quiet us in a death so noble ;

the hero having been permitted by Providence an adequate self-realisation in his life's course, satisfaction is fitting on the

part of his friends, and the poet calls on every heart to echo

the sublime note of resignation that is heard in Samson's

requiem :




All is best, though we oft doubt What the unsearchable dispose

Of highest Wisdom brings about And ever best found in the close.

Taken in its highest sense, this might be the requiem for a

Christian martyr. With a less exalted suggestion it might be

spoken over the body of a Cordelia, or of any one who had

fallen nobly in the cause of natural piety or generosity?any one

who could say with the daughter of Lear,

We are not the first who with best meaning have incurred the worst.

To draw out in full the contrast between the morals of pagan

and of Christian tragedy would be, obviously> too large a task.

Let us remark here only one or two points that concern our

judgments of Sophocles.

It has been a favourite thesis among writers hostile to

Christianity that the paganism of the ancient classics was some

thing bright and cheerful as contrasted with the ascetic gloom of Christianity. This thesis was openly propounded by the

militant paganism of the sixteenth century Renaissance ; it

reappeared in the age of Goethe and Schiller as a feature of the

school of classic-romanticism to which they belonged ; it has

reappeared in the neo-pagan hedonism of poets like Swinburne.

More than once has been quoted Swinburne's lamentable anti

thesis between "

the lilies and languors of virtue and the roses and rapture of vice ". No objective study of the great tragedies of Athens will enable us to give any justification to the notion that Greek religion at its best was a religion of brightness and

hope. No ! Whatever gleams we shall find?and we shall find




many?of bright and encouraging views of human destiny, they will have, at best, the air of anticipations of Christianity, or of

light and warmth that have strayed in upon the, hardness and

gloom of pagan religion from some subtly-diffused radiance of

the Christian revelation. In the trilogies that present us with the names of Agamemnon and Oedipus, the tragedies of Argos and Thebes, we are given the noblest of the creations

bequeathed to us by the dramatic art and also by the ethical

thought of Greece. The ethical spirit that pervades them differs little according as we find it in Aeschylus, Sophocles or

Euripides?at least as regards the direction of man's life. If

Euripides was something of a rebel against the current ideas of

his time, this fact imparted no more cheerful air to the

atmosphere of his dramas. The profoundest and sublimest of

the three is the oldest?Aeschylus. In him we read in its more

sombre colouring the doctrine of Fatalism?of the divine or

primeval?anyhow, non-human?power, that pursues the guilty ?or held-g?ilty

? man, unto punishment

? Nemesis ! the

mysterious evil that falls upon mortals who arrogate too much

to themselves, that drives home the need of moderation in all

things, even in ambitions that seem most high and virtuous.

Lessons are taught that sometimes come near to the more

sombre teachings of Christianity ; we are told : " Seek well

doing ! Shun pride ! Expect justice !" But we have to ask : "

What is well-doing? Where is justice? Before what tribunal am I to be tried? When we ask these questions we are pushed on to terrifying answers

O'er all there hung a shadow and a fear; A sense of mystery the spirit daunted.

It is especially in Aeschylus we feel this shadow in the




atmosphere ; we see crime leading on to crime, and vengeance

following crime in ever fresh retribution of calamity.

Lpt us turn to Sophocles. He is reputed, with justice, the most serene and evenly-balanced of the three great dramatists.

HeNis given the praise of a certain human serenity, fairness and

sweetness that pervade his judgments and his verse. Yet can

all this be set forth as an attractive contrast with Christianity? Let me quote a few phrases :

66 Life is an evil; it were better not to have been born and

next-best to have died in infancy." Life is good only so long as youth lasts; but the joys of youth are follies.

" Life

presents to us but a shadow of happiness, and this fades when

we try to grasp it." "

Age is the time of every evil ; then we

feel more than ever that we are but phantoms grasping at

phantoms." To the wretched outcast Oedipus, the great king Theseus, says : "I, too, am a man and I know that in the day which dawns I have no more share than thou hast." Such are

some of the "

roses and rajftures "

that pagan poetry presents in the sentiments of its most enlightened thinkers. A primal curse is seen descending from generation to generation. "

When a house is shaken from Heaven, calamity never leaves

it, but advances upon the whole race ; one generation frees not

another ; a god dashes them to earth, and there is no release."

No doubt some mitigation of these ideas may be found in other utterances : such is the way of all drama ; but they are typical.*

Nor must we fail to remark that Sophocles as a master

dramatist never fails to interpose the psychology of human motives and human free-will. We shall observe this illustrated

in the few dramas we touch upon.

Perhaps the greatest drama in the world for sheer perfection of narrative construction and of sustained interest in a poignant




subject is Oedipus the King. Of poignant interest in the sub

ject ; for, in truth the interest is so poignant that it offends the

taste of a modern audience. Its central horror is incest, and

this theme has been fatal to the success on the stage not only of

the story of Oedipus, but also of two notable modern plays? the Bride of Messina, by Schiller, and Mirra, by Alfieri, to

which two might be added, the Cenci of Shelley. Sophocles' play may be studied in various translations and critical studies ;

I will linger on it now only to call attention to the thrilling portraiture of the chief character and his fate. Oedipus, deliverer of Thebes, has been chosen as its king ; he weds the widow of his predecessor. A destructive plague is sent by the

gods upon the city, the king is resolved to find out who is the

guilty wretch who has brought upon them this pest. He follows up clue after clue, scorning the suggestive warnings of

the sooth-say er, Tiresias, till at last the dreadful knowledge is forced upon him that the guilt that has angered Heaven is that of hhijself and his wife. He has married his own mother ! Their agonies of shame and despair end in her hanging herself in their bridal chamber and in his blinding himself with his own

hands, then, with his flight into exile, led by the hand of his devoted daughter, Antigone. In the following play of the

trilogy, Oedipus dies in the land of King Theseus of Athens, while we learn that his kinsman, Creon, has usurped the

sovereignty of Thebes, and that his two sons have engaged in

fratricidal war beside the walls of Thebes. In the third play of the trilogy, Antigone is the chief personage. Her two brothers have fallen in battle. Creon proclaims that no funeral rites are

to be rendered to the younger, his enemy, Polynices. Antigone resolves that this worst of outrages (according to Greek ideas) shall not be inflicted upon her brother. In vain her sister, Ismene, and the chorus of elders entreat her to obey the edict,



4S0 THE IRISH MONTHLY

which is imposed under pain of death. She appeals to eternal

and unchangeable laws, ratified by Zeus above and by the dark

powers and of the world below. She dies ; but the king loses

his son, who had been betrothed to Antigone, and then his

wife, both by their self-murder.

What does Sophocles think of these horrors, and whgt light does he throw upon them? What shall we say of the resistance

and self-sacrifice of Antigone ? I should like to quote, here, were there time, many pages

from a gjreat little book of 120 pages?a book on St. Thomas

More, written by Professor R. W. Chambers and prefaced by Lord Russell of Killowen. It compares the admirable attitude of Antigone before the Theban king with that of St. Thomas

More before an English tyrant. I quote from Chambers : 66

Antigone will remain for all time, the great example in literature of the claims of conscience against the law of the State. And More is likely, in increasing measure, to be

regarded as the great example of the same thing in history :

partly because of his high position, partly because of the extreme moderation of his claim and the lack of moderation on the part of his opponents, put him more clearly in the right than even Antigone was . . . Chesterton said, some eight

years Ego (that is,, in 1980) . . . that, important as More was

at that moment, he was not quite as,important as he would be

in about a hundred years' time. And this must prove true if More's death comes, to be regarded as the type of the struggle between the law of the State and a higher law . . . Froude

makes More say on the scaffold that he died ' a faithful servant

of God and the king '. What More really said was . . . ' the

faithful servant of the king and in fhe first place of God '. I do not believe that here Froude deliberately misquoted. I believe that he honestly never saw the difference. Yet, upon




that question?such is the solemn conclusion of Professor

Chambers?whether or no we place Divine Law in the last

resort above the law of the State?depends the whole future of

the world.".

Note that Professor Chambers regards More as having been more clearly in the right than even Antigone was. We need

not then regard her as having been a perfect character. Rather

may we accept her as an illustration of a valid thesis which

points out that tragedy ist often the study of a noble character

spoiled in its perfection of its' success by a single flaw.

Admiration for the heroine who defied Creon may still find her

blameworthy in her over-haste and passionate contempt for

counsel and rush onward to suicide.

Let us look back to what we have said as to the essential functions of tragedy. How far does the story of King Oedipus and his daughter fit in with the notion of Katharsis?of a puri fication by fear and terror? Thus, I think?Sophocles seems

to regard the calamities of the good as parts of human life taken as a whole?not as unaccountable inflictions on individuals.

They are necessary for the testing and development of human

souls. What should we know of the precious elements in a

soul as-that of Antigone, or of a Prometheus, or of a Cordelia, or of a Hamlet, did they not shine out among the errors, perhaps

inculpable, of the sufferers themselves, and among the imper

fections of a world in which justice and the virtues in general have so little predominance ? And is not this sublime and true

teaching ? Christian ethics gives us no higher thought than that the advancement of mankind proceeds rather from failures and

endurance than from prosperity and success1.

Antigone herself is no victim of despair. She feels intensely, 1 The ideas here touched on have been exhaustively treated in the essays collected

by Professor Evelyn Abbott under the title of Hellenico (Longmans, 1898). See also

Nphte Castle by Christopher Hollis (same publishers).




bo doubt, the sacrifice of her young life and of her young betrothed: but she has within her the hope that love, and therefore joy, will still prevail when she has faced those dark

powers to which she is giving herself. " When I pass through

those gates," she says, "

such are the hopes I cherish, I shall find love with my father, love with my mother, love with both

my brothers," especially with him for. whose sake she had given up everything. Her sacrifice will not have been in vain, she

feels ; and her poet, too, feels, however vaguely, that there is in

the eternal scheme of things some eye, some hand, that finds

in such deeds an imperishable value.

The heroic Antigone can hardly fail to win the sympathy of any audience ; the no less heroic Electra is far less sure of

unanimous and complete acceptance. She has to support the

main weight of a terrible, nay, horrible, tragedy. To

sympathise with Electra we have to recall the? whole dreadful

story of the murder of her father by his wife and his wife's

paramour ; their usurpation of the throne of Argos from her

brother, Orestes ; their subsequent ill-treatment of all the living witnesses of their guilt. Electra herself is a strong character?

amazingly strong for a girl still in her tender years. She has

provided for her brother at a neighbouring friendly court. She cherishes an active longing for a bloody revenge to be taken one

day on the two criminals : she will not listen to the counsels of

peace addressed to her by her sister and by the timid, though faithful, maidens of the chorus. Then a faithful old servant comes to her from her exiled brother, Orestes. He acts a

cautious part, bringing with him an urn supposed to contain

the ashes of the deceased Orestes, and an elaborate story of

Orestes' supposed death. In reality he is accompanied by the

living Orestes, together with a faithful friend, Pylades. Clytemnestra is kept from knowledge of the truth, while the




false story gives her unmistakable pleasure ; but in Electra the

deepest grief is succeeded by a flood of joy, when her brother makes himself 'known to her. They plot at once to inflict

murderous vengeance on Clytemnestra in the temporary absence

of Aegisthus, and then upon him. Their plan succeeds and two

more corpses stain with their blood the floor of that fatal Argive palace.

Electra, "wrho has led up to this climax by speeches in the tone of Lady Macbeth, is indeed a heroine, but one may feel her to be something of a termagant. To escape this impression we have to realise the horrors in the memory and endurance

of which her childhood has grown up : we must feel the mastery with which Sophocles has put his drama before us ; and Electra must be interpreted for us* by an actress who can make us feel

the forces of refinement and charm that the dramatist has put into his conception ^f the formidable daughter of Agamemnon.

And, finally, let us ask how does this play stand in the light of the Aristotelian Katharsis?the purification by pity and terror? How does it appear in comparison with a great play of

Shakespeare, such as King Lear or Macbeth? I can only refer

you for answer to a reading of the plays themselves?adding the remark that good translations of the Greek plays are not hard to find. I should like, however, to put before you a

parallel criticism quoted?though not accepted?by Dr. Bradley (in his Shakespearean Tragedy)?a passage from Swinburne, of

eloquent language, but unacceptable criticism. In Greek tragedy,

says Swinburne (I condense his words) we find darkness and

despair* In Prometheus or Orestes the hand of Heaven is indeed laid too heavily for the hero to bear -, still, beyond the

gloom we see the dawning of a morning when righteousness and

omnipotence shall meet in reconciliation. Redemption,

amends, explanation, pity and mercy, are words without, a




meaning in King Lear. Here is no need of the Furies, Chil dren of Night, here is very Night herself.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods ;

They kill us for their sjmrt.

Now, it needs no deep study of King Lear to realise that those words of the distracted Gloster do not at all

" strike the

keynote "

of the play. The plain truth is that the whole S win

burnian passage is far less applicable to Shakespeare's play than

to the tragedies of Thebes and Argos. We have been at pains to show that gleams t)f brightness are not wanting to those

terrible trilogies. But terrible they remain, nevertheless; and

Shakespeare is far more generous in shedding Christian, light and harmony upon his types?even those that he places in pre

Christian ages?than Aeschylus and Sophocles, Cordelia shines

in the light of generous forgiveness ; Electra is a grim image of

unrelenting vengeance. One perishes in an endeavour to save

her erring father, the other wields an axe to split the skull of

her guilty mother. The Titan Prometheus is a noble figure,

undoubtedly ; but he dies defying the gods of Heaven ; the

giant, Samson, is laid to rest with a requiem of patience. Let

me add to these grave thoughts a ludicrous anecdote of

unexpected comparisons. An old lady was brought to see a

film which featured the life of Cleopatra. After seeing its somewhat lurid episodes, she said :

" Oh, what a contrast to our

dear Queen Victoria!"

The anecdote may warn us that we must not carry com

parisons too far. Types of dramatic art, as of living personality must be allowed to vary widely. If we look only for mild,

soothing and edifying careers we must avoid the Electras and

Macbeths, and frequent only the "

pictures passed for general




exhibition." But if we want to study the colossal heights and

depths of human nature it is to the great builders of drama like Sophocles and Shakespeare, Corneille and Racine we must

go; "in their great plays," to quote Dr. Bradley, i(

pity and

terror, carried perhaps to the extreme limit of art, are so

blended with a sense of law and beauty that we feel at last not

depression and, much less, despair, but a consciousness of

greatness in pain and of solemnity in the mystery we cannot

fathom." We even glimpse in them and through them a world that is supernatural.

An address delivered to the Professional Men's ?Sodality, St Patrick's College, E. Melbourne.



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The Tragedies of Sophocles