Part 17 (2/2)
Before the verdict of so many ages one may well shrink from pa.s.sing an unfavourable criticism. That he had many of the qualifications of a great poet is undeniable; his technical skill is extraordinary; his variety of phrase is infinite; his colouring is often brilliant. And even his positive faults, the faults of his age, the crowding of detail, the rhetoric, the bombast, offend rather by their quant.i.ty than quality.
Alone of the epic[543] writers of his age he rarely raises a derisive laugh from the irreverent modern. Again, his average level is high, higher than that of any post-Ovidian poet. And yet that high level is due to the fact that he rarely sinks rather than that he rises to sublime heights. His brilliant metre, always vivacious and vigorous, seldom gives us a line that haunts the memory; and therefore, though its easy grace and facile charm may for a while attract us, we soon weary of him. He lacks warmth of emotion and depth of colour. In this respect he has been not inaptly compared to Ovid. Ovid said of Callimachus _quamvis ingenio non valet, arte valet_.[544] Ovid's detractors apply the epigram to Ovid himself. This is unjust, but so far as such a comprehensive dictum can be true of any distinguished writer, it is true of Statius.
Scarcely inferior to Ovid in readiness and fertility, he ranks far below the earlier writer in all poetic essentials. Ovid's gifts are similar but more natural; his vision is clearer, his imagination more penetrating. 'The paces of Statius are those of the _manege_, not of nature';[545] he loses himself in the trammels of his art. He lacks, as a rule, the large imagination of the poet; and though his detail may often please, the whole is tedious and disappointing. Merivale sums him up admirably:[546] 'Statius is a miniature painter employed on the production of a great historic picture: every part, every line, every shade is touched and retouched; approach the canvas and examine it with gla.s.ses, every thread and hair has evidently received the utmost care and taken the last polish; but step backwards and embrace the whole composition in one gaze, and the general effect is confused from want of breadth and largeness of treatment.'
He was further handicapped by his choice of a subject.[547] The Theban legend is unsuitable for epic treatment for more reasons than one. In the first place the story is unpleasant from beginning to end. Horror acc.u.mulates on horror, crime on crime, and there are but three characters which evoke our sympathy, Oedipus, Jocasta, and Antigone.
These characters play only subsidiary parts in the story of the expedition of the Seven against Thebes, round which the Theban epic turns. The central characters are almost of necessity the odious brothers Eteocles and Polynices: Oedipus appears only to curse his sons.
Antigone and Jocasta come upon the scene only towards the close in a brief and futile attempt to reconcile the brothers. The deeds and deaths of the Argive chiefs may relieve the horror and at times excite our sympathy, but we cannot get away from the fact that the story is ultimately one of almost b.e.s.t.i.a.l fratricidal strife, darkened by the awful shadow of the woes of the house of Labdacus. The old Greek epic a.s.signed great importance to the character of Amphiaraus[548] persuaded by his false wife, Eriphyla, to go forth on the enterprise that should be his doom; it has even been suggested that he formed the central character of the poem. If this suggestion be true--and its truth is exceedingly doubtful--we are confronted with what was in reality only a false s.h.i.+ft, the diversion of the interest from the main issues of the story to a side issue. The _Iliad_ cannot be quoted in his defence; there we have an episode of a ten years' siege, which in itself possesses genuine unity and interest. But the Theban epic comprises the whole story of the expedition of the seven chieftains, and it is idle to make Amphiaraus the central figure. In any case the prominence given to the fortunes of the house of Labdacus by the great Greek dramatists, and the genius with which they brought out the genuinely dramatic issues of the legend, had made it impossible for after-comers to take any save the Labdacidae for the chief actors in their story. And so from Antimachus onward Polynices and Eteocles are the tragic figures of the epic.
To give unity to this story all our attention must be concentrated on Thebes. The enlistment of Adrastus in the cause of Polynices must be described, and following this the gathering of the hosts of Argos. But when once the Argive demands are rejected by Thebes, the poet's chief aim must be to get his army to Thebes with all speed, and set it in battle array against the enemy. Once at Thebes, there is plenty of room for tragic power and stirring narrative. First comes the ineffectual attempt of Jocasta to reconcile her scarce human sons; then comes the battle, with the gradual overthrow of the chieftains of Argos, the turning of the scale of battle in favour of Thebes by the sacrifice of Menoeceus, and last the crowning combat between the brothers. There, from the artistic standpoint, the story finds its ending. It could never have been other than forbidding, but it need not have lacked power. Unfortunately, precedent did not allow the story to end there.
The Thebans forbid burial to the Argive dead; Antigone transgresses the edict by burying her brother Polynices, and finds death the reward of her piety; Theseus and the Athenians come to Adrastus' aid, defeat the Thebans, and bury the Argive dead, while as a sop to Argive feeling they are promised their revenge in after years, when the children of the dead have grown to man's estate. If it were felt that the deadly struggle between the two brothers closed the epic on a note of unrelieved gloom and horror, there was perhaps something to be said for introducing the story of Antigone's self-sacrifice, and closing on a note of tragic beauty. Unhappily, the story of Antigone involved the introduction of material sufficient for one, if not two fresh epics in the legend of the Athenian War and the triumphant return of Argos to the conflict. Antimachus[549] fell into the snare. His vast _Thebais_ told the whole story from the arrival of Polynices at Argos to the victory of the Epigoni. Nor was he content with this alone, but must needs clog the action of his poem with long descriptions of the gathering of the host at Argos, and of their adventures on the march to Thebes. And so it came about that he consumed twenty-four books in getting his heroes to Thebes!
The precedent of Antimachus proved fatal to Statius. He did not, it is true, run to such prolixity as his Greek predecessor; he eliminated the legend of the Epigoni altogether, only alluding to it once in vague and general terms; he succeeded in getting the story, down to the burial of the Argive dead, within the compa.s.s of twelve books of not inordinate length. But it is possible to be prolix without being an Antimachus, and the prolixity of Statius is quite sufficient. The Argives do not reach Thebes till half-way through the seventh book,[550] the brothers do not meet till half-way through the eleventh book. The result is that the compression of events in the last 300 lines of the eleventh book and in the last book is almost grotesque; for these 1,100 lines contain the death of Jocasta, the banishment of Oedipus, the flight of the Argives, the prohibition to bury the Argive dead, the arrival of the wives of the vanquished, the devotion of Antigone and Argia, the wife of Polynices, their detection and sentencing to death, the arrival of the Athenians under Theseus, the defeat and death of Creon, and the burial of the fallen. The effect is disastrous. As we have seen, this appendix to the main story of the feud between the brothers cannot form a satisfactory conclusion to the story. Treated with the perfunctory compression of Statius, it becomes flat and ineffective; even the reader who finds Statius at his best attractive is tempted to throw down the _Thebais_ in disgust.
It is perhaps in his concluding scenes that we see Statius at his worst, but his capacity for irrelevance and digression is an almost equally serious defect. That he should use the conventional supernatural machinery is natural and permissible, though tedious to the modern reader, who finds it hard to sympathize with outworn literary conventions. But there are few epics where divine intervention is carried to a greater extent than in the _Thebais_.[551] And not content with the intervention of the usual G.o.ds and furies, on two occasions Statius brings down frigid abstractions from the skies in the shape of Virtus[552] and Pietas.[553] Again, while auguries and prophecies play a legitimate part in such a work, nothing can justify, and only the pa.s.sion of the Silver Age for the supernatural can explain, the protraction of the scenes of augury at Thebes and Argos to 114 and 239 lines respectively. Equally disproportionate are the catalogues of the Argive and the Theban armies, making between them close on 400 lines.[554] Nor is imitation of Vergil the slightest justification for introducing a night-raid in which Hopleus and Dymas are but pale reflections of Nisus and Euryalus,[555] for expending 921 lines over the description of the funeral rites and games in honour of the infant Opheltes,[556] or putting the irrelevant history of the heroism of Coroebus in the mouth of Adrastus, merely that it may form a parallel to the tale of Hercules and Cacus told by Evander.[557] Worst of all is the enormous digression,[558] consuming no less than 481 lines, where Hypsipyle narrates the story of the Lemnian ma.s.sacre. And yet this is hardly more than a digression in the midst of a digression. The Argive army are marching on Thebes. Bacchus, desirous to save his native town, causes a drought in the Peloponnese. The Argives, on the verge of death, and maddened with thirst, come upon Hypsipyle, the nurse of Opheltes, the son of Lycurgus, King of Nemea. Hypsipyle leaves her charge to show them the stream of Langia, which alone has been unaffected by the drought, and so saves the Argive host. She then at enormous length narrates to Adrastus the story of her life, how she was daughter of Thoas, King of Lemnos, and how, when the women of Lesbos slew their mankind, she alone proved false to their hideous compact, and saved her father. After describing the arrival of the Argonauts at Lemnos, and her amour with Jason, to whom she bore two sons, she tells how she was banished from Lesbos on the discovery that Thoas, her father, still lived, how she was captured by pirates, and twenty long years since sold into slavery to Lycurgus. This prodigious narration finished, it is discovered that a serpent sacred to Jupiter has killed Opheltes.
Lycurgus, hearing the news, would have slain Hypsipyle, but she is protected by the Argives whom she has saved. Then follows the burial of Opheltes--henceforth known as Archemorus--and his funeral games.
Now it is not improbable that the story of Opheltes and Hypsipyle occurred in the old cyclic poem.[559] But that scarcely justifies Statius in devoting the whole of the fifth and sixth books and some 200 lines of the fourth to the description of an episode so alien to the main interest of the poem. But if we cannot justify these copious digressions and irrelevances we can explain them. The _Thebais_ was written primarily for recitation; many of these episodes which are hopelessly superfluous to the real story are admirably designed for the purpose of recitation. The truth is that Statius had many qualifications for the writing of _epyllia_, few for writing epic on a large scale. He has therefore sacrificed the whole to its parts, and relies on brilliance of description to catch the ear of an audience, rather than on sustained epic dignity and ordered development of his story. But although he cannot give real unity to his epic, he succeeds, by dint of his astonis.h.i.+ng fluency and his mastery over his instrument, in giving a specious appearance of unity. The sutures of his story are well disguised and his inconsistencies of no serious importance. He fails as an epic writer, but he fails gracefully.
It is, however, possible for an epic to be structurally ineffective and yet possess high poetic merit. Statius' episodes do not cohere; how far have they any splendour in their isolation? The answer to the question must be on the whole unfavourable. The reasons for this are diverse. In the first place the characters for the most part fail to live. Statius can give us a vivid impression of the outward semblance of a man; we see Parthenopaeus and Atys, we see Jocasta and Antigone, we see the struggle of Eteocles and Polynices vividly enough. But we see them as strangers, standing out, it is true, from the crowd in which they move, but still wholly unknown to us. We cannot differentiate Polynices and Eteocles save that the latter, from the very situation in which he finds himself, is necessarily the more odious of the two; Polynices would have shown himself the same, had the fall of the lot given him the first year of kings.h.i.+p. Jocasta and Antigone, Creon and Menoeceus, Hypsipyle and Lycurgus, play their parts correctly enough, but they do not live, nor people our brain with moving images. We are told that they behaved in such and such a way under such and such circ.u.mstances; we are told, and admit, that such conduct implies certain moral qualities, but Statius does not make us feel that his characters possess such qualities. The reason for this lies partly in the fact that they all speak the same brilliant rhetoric,[560] partly in the fact that Statius lacks the direct sincerity of diction that is required for the expression of strong and poignant emotion. Anger he can depict; anger suffers less than other emotions from rhetoric. Hence it is that he has succeeded in drawing the character of Tydeus, whose brutality is redeemed from hideousness by the fact that it is based on the most splendid physical courage, and fired by strong loyalty to his comrade and sometime foe Polynices. His accents ring true. When he has gone to Thebes to plead Polynices' cause, and his demands have been angrily refused by Eteocles, who concludes by saying (ii. 449),
nec ipsi, si modo notus amor meritique est gratia, patres reddere regna sinent,
Nor will the fathers of the city, if they but know the love I bear them or if they have aught of grat.i.tude, allow me to give back the kings.h.i.+p.
Tydeus will hear no more, but breaks in with a cry of fury (ii. 452):
'reddes,'
ingeminat 'reddes; non si te ferreus agger ambiat aut triplices alio tibi carmine muros Amphion auditus agat, nil tela nec ignes obst.i.terint, quin ausa luas nostrisque sub armis captivo moribundus humum diademate pulses.
tu merito; ast horum miseret, quos sanguine viles coniugibus natisque infanda ad proelia raptos proicis excidio, bone rex. o quanta Cithaeron funera sanguineusque vadis, Ismene, rotabis!
haec pietas, haec magna fides! nec crimina gentis mira equidem duco: sic primus sanguinis auctor incestique patrum thalami; sed fallit origo: Oedipodis tu solus eras, haec praemia morum ac sceleris, violente, feres! nos poscimus annum; sed moror.' haec audax etiamnum in limine retro vociferans iam tunc impulsa per agmina praeceps evolat.
'Thou shalt give it back,' he cries, 'thou shalt give it back.
Though thou wert girdled with a wall of bronze, or Amphion's voice be heard and with a new song raise triple bulwarks about thee; fire and sword should not save thee from the doom of thy daring, and, struck down by our swords, thy diadem should smite the ground as thou fallest dying, our captive. Thus shouldst _thou_ have thy desert; but _these_ I pity, whose blood thou ratest lightly, and whom thou s.n.a.t.c.hest from their children and their wives to give them over to death, thou virtuous king. What vast slaughter, Cithaeron, and thou, Ismenus, shalt thou see whirl down thy blood-stained shallows. This is thy piety, this thy true faith! nor marvel I at the crimes of such a race: 'twas for this that thou hadst such an author of thy being, for this thy father's marriage-bed was stained with incest. But thou art deceived as to thine own birth and thy brother's; thou alone wast begotten of Oedipus, that shall be the reward for thy nature and thy crime, fierce man. We ask but for a year! But I tarry over long.' These words he shouted back at him while he still lingered on the threshold; then headlong burst through the crowd of foemen and sped away.
As he is here, so is he always, unwavering in decision, prompt of speech and of action. Caught in ambush, ill-armed and solitary, by the treacherous Thebans, as he returns from his futile emba.s.sy, he never hesitates; he seizes the one point of vantage, crushes his foes, and when he speaks, speaks briefly and to the point. He spares the last of his fifty a.s.sailants and sends him back to Thebes with a message of defiance, brief, natural, and manly (ii. 697):
quisquis es Aonidum, quem crastina munere nostro manibus exemptum mediis Aurora videbit, haec iubeo perferre duci: cinge aggere portas, tela nova, fragiles aevo circ.u.m inspice muros, praecipue stipare viros densasque memento multiplicare acies! fumantem hunc aspice late ense meo campum: tales in bella venimus.
Whoe'er thou art of the Aonides, whom to-morrow's dawn shall see saved from the world of the dead by my boon, I bid thee bear this message to thy chief: 'Raise mounds about the gates, forge new weapons, look to your walls that crumble with years, and above all be mindful to marshal thick and multiply thine hosts! Behold this plain smoking with the work of my sword.
Such men are we when we enter the field of battle.'
On his return to Argos he bursts impetuously into the palace, crying fiercely for war.[561] When Lycurgus would slay Hypsipyle for her neglect of her nursling, he saves her.[562] She has preserved the Argive army, and Tydeus, if he never forgives an enemy, never forgets a friend.
He alone defeats the entreaties of Jocasta[563] and launches the hosts of Argos into battle; and when his own doom is come, he dies as he had lived, _impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis_; he has no thought for himself; he cares nought for due burial (viii. 736):
non ossa precor referantur ut Argos Aetolumve larem; nec enim mihi cura supremi funeris: odi artus fragilemque hunc corporis usum, desertorem animi.
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