Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 7

(I)

IT seems that on listening to some Greek lines included in my talk the other day, many of you have expressed a desire to hear a little more about Greek poetry. This then will be my subject today.

I am particularly reminded in this connection of a line from Sophocles, the dramatist – like the Latin sentence I quoted on the last occasion. Sri Aurobindo himself had read out this line to me more than once and given it an extremely beautiful interpretation. It is the opening line of Sophocles' famous play, Antigone, which happened to be the second book I studied while learning Greek. The first was Euripides' Medea, which is Media in Greek – note here the play on long vowels to which I have referred in my last talk.

This is how Sophocles begins his play with the following words put in the mouth of Antigone:

O koinon autadelphon Ismenes kara.

"O Ismene, we two have been born as if with one body",

or to put it a little more literally

"O lovely head of Ismene, common to both, born of the

same self."

What hidden depths of feeling are brought forth in these few

compact words! Very strange and peculiar is the character of this Antigone. Outwardly, there is in her nature a strength, a hardness that amounts almost to harshness. There seems to be no room there for any tender feelings or love, and any kind of softness. There is only an unflinching resolve to carry out her duty and fulfill her vow, the rude austerity of an ascetic.

Her sister on the other hand is of a diametrically opposite nature. When she hears of the daring and dangerous resolution of her sister to act in defiance of the royal edict, she complains in frightened tones, "Such acts are for men, they do not befit a woman, these defiant attitudes." She goes on to suggest that even the work she has undertaken to give a burial to her dead brother at all costs may not so much be an expression of her sisterly affection as a token of her hard sense of duty in the fulfilment of a difficult vow. She has been wandering day and night through the roads of alien lands hand in hand with her old blind father borne down by fatigue. How pathetic are the words of the old man almost on the verge of death:

"Child of an old, blind sire, Antigone,

What region, say, whose city have we reached?

Who will provide today with scanted dole

This wanderer? 'Tis little that he craves,

And less obtains – that less enough for me."

(Storr)

But one may still wonder how much of this is proof of Antigone's true love for her father, and how much of it is born of the pride or glory in carrying out her duty. But it is not altogether like that. This fanatical devotion to duty, this harsh ascetic trait in Antigone is actually a pose, an outer mask. She has suppressed, forcibly pushed into the background her innate gift of affection, her volcanic power of love. There is one she has loved and still loves, but far

from turning her gaze upon this object of her love, she has hardly once taken his name. She has tortured and sacrificed herself in order to forget about her love. Not only has she suffered persecution herself – she has done so by her own choice; she would drag along others as well, her dear sister and even her dearest beloved, into the same persecution. There has been no respite for her till the last refuge in death. But this is no other than a form of deep affection and love, a reverse aspect. I have said in the beginning what depths of feeling and intense love pervade her body, mind and heart; these have sought to find their forceful outlet in her very first utterance: the twin sisters are not two but are one in reality, not two heads but one as it were in possession of two bodies. How much tenderness lies packed and hidden behind these simple words! Let me repeat them:

O koinon autadelphon Ismenes kara.

"My own, my sister, O beloved face,

Tell me – of all the curses of our race,

What curse shall God not heap on thee and me?

Surely there is no pain, no misery,

No vileness or dishonour, that we two

Have not already seen."

(Murray)

It was Antigone’s hope that her dear sister would eagerly follow her with gladness as soon as she heard her call. But the faith natural to her simple heart received a rude shock when she had an unexpected refusal from her tender-hearted sister. She hardened her heart and in her turn rejected her sister and declared she would proceed all alone to carry out her duty, she needed nobody’s help. She paid no heed to the later repentance and entreaties of her sister.

Her heart has been overflowing with tenderness and love, but these have found no way to an outward expression

or fulfilment. The tears of love have been gathering deep within her heart. She says:

"The deep submerged tears as they shed will turn to ice and seize me all round and will gradually form the tombstone over my body. Niobe, once queen of Thebes was turned to weeping stone. I am like her."

(2)

The key to the drama in Antigone is to be sought in a conflict or clash between the claims of the state and the individual's right to follow the truth of his ideal. The state demands the discipline of laws and the restrictions necessary for an orderly collective life. It cannot tolerate a deviation or protest. It does not grant to any individual the right to move a step away from the prescribed norm. All this ends in tyranny and persecution. The individual on the other hand tends and drives towards freedom and personal rights, the claim to live his own life and follow his own ideals. In this drama, the head of the state has issued orders that no burial rites be given to the deceased traitor to his city, he has to be left at the outskirts of the city there to be preyed upon by birds and beasts. His sister considers this to be an insult to her brother, to her family and to the law of humanity. That is why she would not obey the state's decree. She takes this to be an illegal, high-handed act on the part of the state and its leader. Whatever be the reverence due to the law of the state and howsoever clear its authority, it is a man-made law, temporary and temporal, depending on circumstances. There is another kind of law, an unwritten code derived from God and that cannot be transgressed:

"Yes, for these laws were not ordained of Zeus,

And she who sits enthroned with Gods below,

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Justice enacted not these human laws.

Nor did deem that thou, a mortal man,

Couldst by a breath annul and override

The immutable unwritten Laws of Heaven.

They were not-born today, nor yesterday;

They die not, and none knoweth whence they spring.

(Storr)

These words are reminiscent of the words of the Vedic Rishi who gave us a picture of the "Infallible decrees" of Lord Varuna – adabdhani varunasya vratani. There is no fault or sin in obeying the Laws of Heaven in disregard of the laws of men. Antigone would be courting death, a cruel death, at the hands of mortal man, in order to be true to a vow ordained by something higher than man, and she does so in the end.

There is shown in this play another clash or conflict which takes place within Antigone herself, in the depths of her inner being. This concerns her intimate personal feelings, the satisfaction and fulfilment of her own life, the hidden secret of her love. We have seen a king renounce his throne for the sake of his personal love. We are also familiar with the spectacle of a man, or god-man, sacrificing personal love for the good of the state. Antigone too walks on these paths. She has not demanded the satisfaction of her personal, too intimately personal needs. In her urge to carry out her vow, she has crushed under a weight of stone the feelings, the impulses, the inspiration of her heart.

Sri Rama had sacrificed his love of wife out of consideration for his subjects; it was part of his duty as king. He had, at least at one time, shown a greater regard for his brother than for his wife. The words he has been made to say by Valmiki in this connection have attained celebrity:

dese dese kalatrani dese dese ca bandhavah

tam tu desam na pasyami yatra bhrata sahodarah

"Wives one can get in every nook and corner, and relatives around. But I have yet to find a country where one's brother is a true brother."

These words of the poet and sage have never been cherished among women, far less by the moderns. But the strange thing is that Sophocles has put almost identical words in. the mouth of Antigone, they sound like an echo. When she was accused of having thrown away her heart's love and oppressed her beloved out of regard for what she considered her duty, this is what she said in reply:

"A husband lost, another might be found;

Another son be born if one were slain.

But I, when Hades holds my parents twain,

Must brotherless abide for ever."

(Murray)

The point to note is that whereas in Valmiki a man is made to say that wives are available by the dozen in every land, Sophocles makes a woman declare as if in retort that husbands too are to be had in plenty.

(3)

Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are the three supreme creators of drama in ancient Greece, each of them is different from the others. Aeschylus the senior most of the three has vision and spirit and strength. He throws out the spark and lustre of inner knowledge, there is in him a swift natural movement of a primal concentrated consciousness. He is therefore allotted a seat in the very first rank, with Shakespeare, Dante and Homer. Sophocles reminds one of the French dramatists with their restraint and measure, their skill in delineating subtle feeling. There is here nothing in excess, but there is a sense of subdued force and a suggestion of all-round perfection.

Euripides on the other hand has in him all the doubts and questionings of the human mind, all its curiosity and comment. He reaches out towards the modern mentality, has almost come in line with it.

It was the custom in those days to write trilogies or tetralogies, that is, plays grouped together in a series of three or four. Each of these groups was built around the same theme and dwelt on the different parts of one and the same story; but every piece was to be a self-contained whole, both as a story and a play. Such for example was the Theben trilogy of Sophocles based on the story of the Theben king, Oedipus, and his daughter Antigone, or else, the Orestenian trilogy of Aeschylus dealing with the story of king Agamemnon and his son Orestes – Orestes was the Hamlet of Greek tragedy. The fourth piece in a tetralogy used to be something amusing, like a farce that rounded off the main programme in a Yatra performance of Bengal.

But the theme of tragic drama in Greek is invariably and excessively melodramatic, with a full and free use of the terrible and even the horrid. Things like patricide, matricide and infanticide, oppression and torture, abduction of women, illicit love and incest are represented freely. One gets here the impression of a primitive humanity with all its unbridled licence. A picture is presented with fullest possible detail of the vital impulses in their natural primitive unrefined state.

Our Ramayana and Mahabharata too, no doubt, are replete with instances of this type of mentality. But it has been characterised there as being typical not of man, but of the titan, the demon and the ogre, it is not truly human. The names given to these types indicate their nature. These belong to the undivine nature, whereas man belongs to the divine. The struggle between the divine and the undivine, the gods and the titans, and the final victory of the divine and the gods, this has been the keynote of

great creative work in Indian art and literature, this is the characteristic manner of the Indian conception of life.

Undoubtedly, man in his beginnings was like a primitive beast. But a way had to be found to evolve out of this primitive state a superior kind of humanity. The attacks of the lower nature, the primitive impulses were to be squarely met and caught by the hands and held under like the horns of a bull. He was to learn to endure calmly the elements that create difficulties, dangers and disorders. He had to cross through them into a superior status. He had to see if the mad unseeing impulses could not be changed into the prowess of the warrior, anger into fiery energy, cruelty into valour; he was to see how far the greed for things could be transformed into pure enjoyment. This has been a necessary step in the evolution of humanity.

It is this purifying or transformation of the lower nature that has been called Katharsis by the Greeks. Spiritual seekers in India knew this as the purification of the inner man, citta-suddhi. Indeed, one main aim of Greek tragedy was to effect this inner purification.

The Greek dramatists have in this respect followed a double line of action or procedure. In the first place, no untoward event, be it murder or any undesirable act, could be represented on the stage, that is, openly in public. Any such thing forming part of the plot used to be described in the words of some character in the play; the Chorus was mainly entrusted with this task. Secondly, the story or plot of the drama was so chosen as to raise feelings of disgust or pity in the minds of the audience. Steeped in these feelings of disgust arid pity, the emotions were to get purified. The untoward events not being enacted before the eye, only a picture was presented to the imagination through the medium of language. The grosser things appear as if transfigured in the light of literary language. Besides, the Greek language itself has a power of its own, and this power has been utilised by the dramatists

as an instrument of purification. In this language of ancient Greece, there is such simple beauty and harmony, such an attractive rhythm of movement, a light and a clarity that anything expressed in this language partakes of its form and structure and temperament, acquires as if by contagion a strange -lustre and harmony. Impure and unbridled vital impulses form the subject matter of Greek drama, but the mind and consciousness which the dramatists bring to bear on their subject are full of calm and quiet, order and light. The language of the Greeks has been a simple easy and natural instrument in their hands for the work of purifying the heart and clarifying the mind and the inner being.

(4)

That was the golden age of Greece and Athens, famed in history as the Age of Pericles. Pericles was the leading man in his city, the chief Archon of the state, and a man of great genius. It was largely thanks to his genius that the whole of Greece could attain its supreme point of greatness in all manner of achievement and creative ability. In every field there appeared in that age men of outstanding gifts. In the realm of tragic drama there were Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; in comedy there was Aristophanes. Herodotus the father of History was there and the master sculptor Phidias. Above all, there was Socrates with his band of young disciples. All of them produced their wonderful work during this period of a little more than a hundred years. We may remember that precisely during this period, that is about five hundred years before Christ, Lord Buddha made his appearance in the East, in India. It was thus an Age of Transition, the beginning of a New Age in the history of mankind.

A remarkable thing about these ancients is that almost all of them lived to a ripe old age. They had such an abundance

of vital force that they retained their capacity to work undiminished till the last days of their life. Sophocles went on writing plays till his ninetieth year. He could count as many or more works to his credit than the number of years in his life; he had written more than a hundred of which only about half a dozen are still extant. About Euripides it is said that he had composed twenty three tetralogies, making a total of ninety two pieces, or about one for every year of his life; only some ten out of this number have survived. All of these men were poets and artists and men of high intellectual calibre, but most of them thought fit not to confine themselves within the inner sanctum of their chosen work; they were also great men of action, they devoted themselves to public work in the service of their state, they did a good deal of politics, even took part in wars as common soldiers or as commanders.

An amusing anecdote is told about Sophocles. Towards the end of his life, when he was nearing ninety, his son petitioned the court that his father had been suffering from mental derangement on account of age and in this condition had bequeathed his possessions to a grandson to the exclusion of the son. On being summoned before the court, Sophocles said these words to the judges: "If I am Sophocles, then I cannot have a deranged mind. And if my mind has got deranged, then I am no longer Sophocles." With these words, he read out some extracts from his play, Oedipus at Colonus, which he had just composed and asked the court, "Is it possible for anyone with a derranged head to write like this?" Needless to add, he was acquitted. This Oedipus at Colonus is the last piece he wrote and has been acclaimed with two of his other works as his finest achievement.

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