chorus, which is, not to furnish a running comment, necessary or superfluous, on act after act, but to impress on the spectators the deep lessons of the play, to strengthen faith, to quicken sympathy, to purge men of their selfishness (as Aristotle suggests) by the operation of pity and fear.[1] The fact that the chorus in The Phœnician Maidens are strangers enables them to take an impartial view of the question at issue, and to pronounce on the side of justice. This is precisely what we miss in Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes, where they breathe no word hinting the faintest disapproval of the injustice and perjury of their king, which have brought about the war.
In the Iphigeneia at Aulis, the aloofness of the chorus invests the heroine with a certain majesty of loneliness in her awful trial, which throws her heroism into stronger relief, and reminds us that the Alpine summits of duty must be scaled alone.
So, in the Andromachê, the cautious reticence of the chorus, who, as subjects of the royal house, dare not utter their sentiments,[2] imparts to the heroine a forlorn grandeur, which stimulates the spectators' sympathy and admiration.
In the Electra, the protagonists, daring a deed without a
- ↑ Aristotle's words are:—"It (Tragedy) effects, by means of pity and fear, the purgation (or purification) of such emotions." The question of the precise meaning of this clause has given rise to much learned discussion, and to somewhat esoteric interpretation. The reader who wishes to acquaint himself with the most recent conclusions of English scholarship, will find them ably set forth in Prof. Butcher's Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. The simple interpretation which I have hazarded above assumes that selfishness is the special taint from which our pity and fear need to be purified. These emotions are too apt to be based on solicitude for ourselves or our friends. Hence Tragedy, which takes men out of themselves, till they are "wrought to sympathy with hopes and fears they heeded not," may, by teaching men to feel pity and fear apart from all selfish considerations, be said to tend to the purification of the springs of these emotions within us.
- ↑ They receive a significant hint with respect to this very thing from Hermionê, at the outset (l. 154).
