anly
impersonal; a far metallic clangor of sound, hoarse or harsh,
perhaps, if your delicate ears must call him so; but grand;
immeasurably grand; majestically, ominously and terribly grand;--
ancestral voices prophesying war, and doom, and all dark
tremendous destinies;--and yet he too with serenity and the
Prophecy of Peace and bliss for his last word to us: he will not
leave his avenging Erinyes until by Pallas' wand and will they
are transformed into Eumenides, bringers of good fortune.
Something like that, perhaps, is the impression Aeschylus leaves
on the minds of those who know him. They bear testimony to the
fact that, however grand his style--like a Milton Carlylized in
poetry--thought still seems to overtop it and to be struggling
for expression through a vehicle less than itself.
Says Lytton, not unwisely perhaps: "His genius is so near the
verge of bombast, that to approach his sublime is to rush into
the ridiculous"; and he goes on to say that you might find the
nearest echo of his diction in Shelley's _Prometheus;_ but of his
diction alone; for "his power is in concentration--that of
Shelley in diffuseness." "The intellectuality of Shelley," he
says, "destroyed; that of Aeschylus only increased his command
over the passions. The interest he excites is startling,
terrible, intense." Browning tried to bring over the style; but
left the thought, in an English _Double-Dutched,_ far remoter
than he found it from our understanding. The thought demands in
English a vehicle crystal-clear; but Aeschylus in the Greek is
not crystal-clear: so close-packed and vast are the ideas that
there are lines on lines of which the best scholars can only
conjecture the meaning.--In all this criticism, let me say, one
is but saying what has been said before; echoing Professor
Mahaffy; echoing Professor Gilbert Murray; but there is a need
to give you the best picture possible of this man speaking from
the eternal.--Unless Milton and Carlyle had co-operated to make
it, I think, any tr