Dramatists, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography; Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616; Stratford-upon-Avon (England) -- Biography
3. Another, Æschylus, enlightened by the unconscious divination of
genius, without suspecting that he has behind him, in the East, the
resignation of Job, completes it, unwittingly, by the revolt of
Prometheus; so that the lesson may be complete, and that the human
race, to whom Job has taught but duty, shall feel in Prometheus Right
dawning. There is something ghastly in Æschylus from one end to the
other; there is a vague outline of an extraordinary Medusa behind the
figures in the foreground. Æschylus is magnificent and powerful,--as
though you saw him knitting his brows beyond the sun. He has two
Cains,--Eteocles and Polynices; Genesis has but one. His swarm of
sea-monsters come and go in the dark sky, as a flock of driven birds.
Æschylus has none of the known proportions. He is rough, abrupt,
immoderate, incapable of smoothing the way, almost ferocious, with
a grace of his own which resembles the flowers in wild places, less
haunted by nymphs than by the Eumenides, of the faction of the Titans;
among goddesses choosing the sombre ones, and smiling darkly at the
Gorgons; a son of the earth like Othryx and Briareus, and ready to
attempt again the scaling of heaven against that _parvenu Jupiter._
Æschylus is ancient mystery made man,--something like a Pagan prophet.
His work, if we had it all, would be a kind of Greek bible. Poet
hundred-handed, having an Orestes more fatal than Ulysses and a Thebes
grander than Troy, hard as a rock, raging like the foam, full of
steeps, torrents, and precipices, and such a giant that at times you
might suppose that he becomes mountain. Coming later than the Iliad, he
has the appearance of an elder son of Homer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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