Part 4 (1/2)

His father mounts another steed, and rides With warning voice guiding his son. 'Drive there!

Turn, turn thy car this way.'”[5]

May we not say that the spirit of the poet mounts the chariot with his hero, and accompanies the winged steeds in their perilous flight? Were it not so,--had not his imagination soared side by side with them in that celestial pa.s.sage,--he would never have conceived so vivid an image. Similar is that pa.s.sage in his ”Ca.s.sandra,” beginning

”Ye Trojans, lovers of the steed.”[6]

[Footnote 5: Eur. _Phaet._]

[Footnote 6: Perhaps from the lost ”Alexander” (Jahn).]

5 Aeschylus is especially bold in forming images suited to his heroic themes: as when he says of his ”Seven against Thebes”--

”Seven mighty men, and valiant captains, slew Over an iron-bound s.h.i.+eld a bull, then dipped Their fingers in the blood, and all invoked Ares, Enyo, and death-dealing Flight In witness of their oaths,”[7]

and describes how they all mutually pledged themselves without flinching to die. Sometimes, however, his thoughts are unshapen, and as it were rough-hewn and rugged. Not observing this, Euripides, from too blind a rivalry, sometimes falls under the same censure.

[Footnote 7: _Sept. c. Th._ 42.]

6 Aeschylus with a strange violence of language represents the palace of Lycurgus as _possessed_ at the appearance of Dionysus--

”The halls with rapture thrill, the roof's inspired.”[8]

Here Euripides, in borrowing the image, softens its extravagance[9]--

”And all the mountain felt the G.o.d.”[10]

[Footnote 8: Aesch. _Lycurg._]

[Footnote 9: Lit. ”Giving it a different flavour,” as Arist. _Poet._ ?d?s??? ???? ????? ???st? t?? e?d??, ii. 10.]

[Footnote 10: _Bacch._ 726.]

7 Sophocles has also shown himself a great master of the imagination in the scene in which the dying Oedipus prepares himself for burial in the midst of a tempest,[11] and where he tells how Achilles appeared to the Greeks over his tomb just as they were putting out to sea on their departure from Troy.[12] This last scene has also been delineated by Simonides with a vividness which leaves him inferior to none. But it would be an endless task to cite all possible examples.

[Footnote 11: _Oed. Col._ 1586.]

[Footnote 12: In his lost ”Polyxena.”]

8 To return, then,[13] in poetry, as I observed, a certain mythical exaggeration is allowable, transcending altogether mere logical credence. But the chief beauties of an oratorical image are its energy and reality. Such digressions become offensive and monstrous when the language is cast in a poetical and fabulous mould, and runs into all sorts of impossibilities. Thus much may be learnt from the great orators of our own day, when they tell us in tragic tones that they see the Furies[14]--good people, can't they understand that when Orestes cries out

”Off, off, I say! I know thee who thou art, One of the fiends that haunt me: I feel thine arms About me cast, to drag me down to h.e.l.l,”[15]

these are the hallucinations of a madman?

[Footnote 13: -- 2.]

[Footnote 14: Comp. Petronius, _Satyricon_, ch. i. _pa.s.sim_.]

[Footnote 15: _Orest._ 264.]