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It has nothing else and higher to offer; so, when it fails to imitate, we call it trash. But the theory of Aeschylean Tragedy is the illumination of life. Illumination of life, through a medium quite unlike life.
Douce's little, miserable, gasping, dacelike mouth, with "a glass of wine, Douce?" or "by the by, Douce," whenever he saw that worthy gentleman about to make the Aeschylean improvement of a second person in the dialogue.
Their thought, when not merely practical, is as full of traditional wisdom and extravagant pictures as that of some Aeschylean chorus, and no matter what the topic is, it is as though the present were held at arms length.
Unless Milton and Carlyle had co-operated to make it, I think, any translation of the Agamemnon which so many have tried to translate would be fatiguing and a great bore to read. It may not be amiss to quote three lines from George Peel's David and Bethsabe, which have been often called Aeschylean in audacity:
The scarred man made a curious gesture of the hand, addressing Average Jones in an accent which, even to the young man's long-unaccustomed cars, sounded strange and strained. "Di illi linguam astrinxere; mutus est," said Colonel Graeme, indicating the younger man, and added a sentence in sonorous metrical Greek. Average Jones recalled the Aeschylean line.
A herald from the latter threatens to take the Danaids back with him, but the King intervenes and saves them. There is little in this play but long choral odes; yet one or two Aeschylean features are evident. The King dreads offending the god of suppliants "lest he should make him to haunt his house, a dread visitor who quits not sinners even in the world to come."
But at any rate it is not without precedent in the two greater Greek tragedians. In a chorus of the Seven against Thebes we have: And does not Sophocles make Ajax in his despair quibble upon his own name quite in the Shakespearian fashion, under similar circumstances? Nor does the coarseness with which our great poet is reproached lack an Aeschylean parallel.
The wind whistled in their ears, freighted, as it seemed to them, with the full-throated shout which, according to the AEschylean story, rang through the battle: Sons of the Hellenes! On! Set free your native land! Your children free, your wives, ancestral shrines of gods, And tombs of fathers' fathers! Now for all we strive!
Thirty-six years have gone since my husband and I walked with William Forster through the Phoenix Park, over the spot where, a year later, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke were murdered. And still the Aeschylean "curse" goes on, from life to life, from Government to Government.
Of all Shakespeare's plays, King Lear is unquestionably that in which he has come nearest to the height and to the likeness of the one tragic poet on any side greater than himself whom the world in all its ages has ever seen born of time. It is by far the most AEschylean of his works; the most elemental and primaeval, the most oceanic and Titanic in conception.
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