by Walter Pater
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 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 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 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 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; 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, 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 b
eing 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 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 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.
“And thy mother, when she heard the lowing of the kine, stood up in the midst of them, and cried to them to shake off sleep. And they, casting slumber from their eyes, started upright, a marvel of beauty and order, young and old and maidens yet unmarried. And first, they let fall their hair upon their shoulders; and those whose cinctures were unbound re-composed the spotted fawn-skins, knotting them about with snakes, which rose and licked them on the chin. Some, lately mothers, who with breasts still swelling had left their babes behind, nursed in their arms antelopes, or wild whelps of wolves, and yielded them their milk to drink; and upon their heads they placed crowns of ivy or of oak, or of flowering convolvulus. Then one, taking a thyrsus-wand, struck with it upon a rock, and thereupon leapt out a fine rain of water; another let down a reed upon the earth, and a fount of wine was sent forth there; and those whose thirst was for a white stream, skimming the surface with their finger-tips, gathered from it abundance of milk; and from the ivy of the mystic wands streams of honey distilled. Verily! hadst thou seen these things, thou wouldst have worshipped whom now thou revilest.
“And we shepherds and herdsmen came together to question with each other over this matter — what strange and terrible things they do. And a certain wayfarer from the city, subtle in speech, spake to us— ‘O! dwellers upon these solemn ledges of the hills, will ye that we hunt down, and take, amid her revelries, Agave, the mother of Pentheus, according to the king’s pleasure?’ And he seemed to us to speak wisely; and we lay in wait among the bushes; and they, at the time appointed, began moving their wands for the Bacchic dance, calling with one voice upon Bromius! — Iacchus! — the son of Zeus! and the whole mountain was moved with ecstasy together, and the wild creatures; nothing but was moved in their running. And it chanced that Agave, in her leaping, lighted near me, and I sprang from my hiding-place, willing to lay hold on her; and she groaned out, ‘O! dogs of hunting, these fellows are upon our traces; but follow me! follow! with the mystic wands for weapons in your hands.’ And we, by flight, hardly escaped tearing to pieces at their hands, who thereupon advanced with knifeless fingers upon the young of the kine, as they nipped the green; and then hadst thou seen one holding a bleating calf in her hands, with udder distent, straining it asunder; others tore the heifers to shreds amongst them; tossed up and down the morsels lay in sight — flank or hoof — or hung from the fir-trees, dropping churned blood. The fierce, horned bulls stumbled forward, their breasts upon the ground, dragged on by myriad hands of young women, and in a moment the inner parts were rent to morsels. So, like a flock of birds aloft in flight, they retreat upon the level lands outstretched below, which by the waters of Asopus put forth the fair-flowering crop of Theban people — Hysiae and Erythrae — below the precipice of Cithaeron.” —
A grotesque scene follows, in which the humour we noted, on seeing those two old men diffidently set forth in chaplet and fawn- skin, deepens into a profound tragic irony. Pentheus is determined to go out in arms against the Bacchanals and put them to death, when a sudden desire seizes him to witness them in their encampment upon the mountains. Dionysus, whom he still supposes to be but a prophet or messenger of the god, engages to conduct him thither; and, for greater security among the dangerous women, proposes that he shall disguise himself in female attire. As Pentheus goes within for that purpose, he lingers for a moment behind him, and in prophetic speech declares the approaching end; — the victim has fallen into the net; and he goes in to assist at the toilet, to array him in the ornaments which he will carry to Hades, destroyed by his own mother’s hands. It is characteristic of Euripides — part of his fine tact and subtlety — to relieve and justify what seems tedious, or constrained, or merely terrible and grotesque, by a suddenly suggested trait of homely pathos, or a glimpse of natural beauty, or a morsel of form or colour seemingly taken directly from picture or sculpture. So here, in this fantastic scene our thoughts are changed in a moment by the singing of the chorus, and divert for a while to the dark-haired tresses of the wood; the breath of the river-side is upon us; beside it, a fawn escaped from the hunter’s net is flying swiftly in its joy; like it, the Maenad rushes along; and we see the little head thrown back upon the neck, in deep aspiration, to drink in the dew.
Meantime, Pentheus has assumed his disguise, and comes forth tricked up with false hair and the dress of a Bacchanal; but still with some misgivings at the thought of going thus attired through the streets of Thebes, and with many laughable readjustments of the unwonted articles of clothing. And with the woman’s dress, his madness is closing faster round him; just before, in the palace, terrified at the noise of the earthquake, he had drawn sword upon a mere fantastic appearance, and pierced only the empty air. Now he begins to see the sun double, and Thebes with all its towers repeated, while his conductor seems to him transformed into a wild beast; and now and then, we come upon some touches of a curious psychology, so that we might almost seem to be reading a modern poet. As if Euripides had been aware of a not unknown symptom of
incipient madness (it is said) in which the patient, losing the sense of resistance, while lifting small objects imagines himself to be raising enormous weights, Pentheus, as he lifts the thyrsus, fancies he could lift Cithaeron with all the Bacchanals upon it. At all this the laughter of course will pass round the theatre; while those who really pierce into the purpose of the poet, shudder, as they see the victim thus grotesquely clad going to his doom, already foreseen in the ominous chant of the chorus — and as it were his grave-clothes, in the dress which makes him ridiculous.
Presently a messenger arrives to announce that Pentheus is dead, and then another curious narrative sets forth the manner of his death. Full of wild, coarse, revolting details, of course not without pathetic touches, and with the loveliness of the serving Maenads, and of their mountain solitudes — their trees and water — never quite forgotten, it describes how, venturing as a spy too near the sacred circle, Pentheus was fallen upon, like a wild beast, by the mystic huntresses and torn to pieces, his mother being the first to begin “the sacred rites of slaughter.”
