Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 2 of 2)

by John Addington Symonds

CONTENTS OF VOL. II.

CHAPTER XIV.
GREEK TRAGEDY AND EURIPIDES.
Two Conditions for the Development of a National Drama.—The Attic Audience.—The Persian War.—Nemesis the Cardinal Idea of Greek Tragedy.—Traces of the Doctrine of Nemesis in Early Greek Poetry.—The Fixed Material of Greek Tragedy.—Athens in the Age of Euripides.—Changes introduced by him in Dramatic Art.—The Law of Progress in all Art.—Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.—The Treatment of εὐψυχία by Euripides.—Menoikeus.—The Death of Eteocles and Polynices.—Polyxena.—Medea.—Hippolytus.—Electra and Orestes.—Injustice done to Euripides by Recent Critics.	Page [9]
CHAPTER XV.
THE FRAGMENTS OF ÆSCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, EURIPIDES.
Alexandrian and Byzantine Anthologies.—Titles of the Lost Plays of Æschylus.—The Lycurgeia.—The Trilogy on the Story of Achilles.—The Geography of the Prometheus Unbound.—Gnomic Character of the Sophoclean Fragments.—Providence, Wealth, Love, Marriage, Mourning.—What is True of the Sophoclean is still more True of the Euripidean Fragments.—Mutilated Plays.—Phaëthon, Erechtheus, Antiope, Danaë.—Goethe's Restitution of the Phaëthon.—Passage on Greek Athletes in the Autolycus.—Love, Women, Marriage, Domestic Affection, Children.—Death.—Stoical Endurance.—Justice and the Punishment of Sin.—Wealth.—Noble Birth.—Heroism.—Miscellaneous Gnomic Fragments.—The Popularity of Euripides.	Page [74]
CHAPTER XVI.
THE FRAGMENTS OF THE LOST TRAGIC POETS.
Apparent Accident in the Preservation of Greek Poetry.—Criticism among the Ancients.—Formation of Canons.—Libraries.—The Political Vicissitudes of Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople.—Byzantine Scholarship in the Ninth Century.—The Lost MS. of Menander.—Tragic Fragments preserved by the Comic Poets and their Scholiasts; by Athenæus, by Stobæus.—Aristotle.—Tragedy before Æschylus.—Fragments of Aristarchus.—The Medea of Neophron.—Ion.—The Games of Achæus.—Agathon; his Character for Luxurious Living.—The Flower.—Aristotle's Partiality for Agathon.—The Family of Æschylus.—Meletus and Plato among the Tragic Playwrights.—The School of Sophocles.—Influence of Euripides.—Family of Carkinus.—Tragedians Ridiculed by Aristophanes.—The Sisyphus of Critias.—Cleophon.—Cynical Tragedies ascribed to Diogenes.—Extraordinary Fertility of the Attic Drama.—The Repetition of Old Plots.—Mamercus and Dionysius.—Professional Rhetoricians appear as Playwrights.—The School of Isocrates.—The Centaur of Chæremon.—His Style.—The Themistocles of Moschion.—The Alexandrian Pleiad.—The Adonis of Ptolemy Philopator.	Page [113]
CHAPTER XVII.
ANCIENT AND MODERN TRAGEDY.
Greek Tragedy and the Rites of Dionysus.—A Sketch of its Origin and History.—The Attic Theatre.—The Actors and their Masks.—Relation of Sculpture to the Drama in Greece.—The Legends used by the Attic Tragedians.—Modern Liberty in the Choice of Subjects.—Mystery Plays.—Nemesis.—Modern Tragedy has no Religious Idea.—Tragic Irony.—Aristotle's Definition of Tragedy.—Modern Tragedy offers no κάθαρσις of the Passions.—Destinies and Characters.—Female Characters.—The Supernatural.—French Tragedy.—Five Acts.—Bloodshed.—The Unities.—Radical Differences in the Spirit of Ancient and Modern Art.	Page [145]
CHAPTER XVIII.
ARISTOPHANES.
Heine's Critique on Aristophanes.—Aristophanes as a Poet of the Fancy.—The Nature of his Comic Grossness.—Greek Comedy in its Relation to the Worship of Dionysus.—Greek Acceptance of the Animal Conditions of Humanity.—His Burlesque, Parody, Southern Sense of Fun.—Aristophanes and Menander.—His Greatness as a Poet.—Glimpses of Pathos.—His Conservatism and Serious Aim.—Socrates, Agathon, Euripides.—German Critics of Aristophanes.—Ancient and Modern Comedy.—The Birds.—The Clouds.—Greek Youth and Education.—The Allegories of Aristophanes.—The Thesmophoriazusæ.—Aristophanes and Plato.	Page [171]
CHAPTER XIX.
THE COMIC FRAGMENTS.
Three Periods in Attic History.—The Three Kinds of Comedy: Old, Middle, New.—Approximation of Comedy to the Type of Tragedy.—Athenæus as the Source of Comic Fragments.—Fragments of the Old Comedy.—Satire on Women.—Parasites.—Fragments of the Middle Comedy.—Critique of Plato and the Academic Philosophers.—Literary Criticism.—Passages on Sleep and Death.—Attic Slang.—The Demi-monde.—Theophrastus and the Later Rhetoricians.—Cooks and Cookery-books.—Difficulty of Defining the Middle from the New Comedy.—Menander.—Sophocles and Menander.—Epicureanism.—Menander's Sober Philosophy of Life.—Goethe on Menander.—Philemon.—The Comedy of Manners culminated in Menander.—What we mean by Modernism.—Points of Similarity and Difference between Ancient and Modern Comedy.—The Freedom of Modern Art.	Page [216]
CHAPTER XX.
THE IDYLLISTS.
Theocritus: his Life.—The Canon of his Poems.—The Meaning of the Word Idyl.—Bucolic Poetry in Greece, Rome, Modern Europe.—The Scenery of Theocritus.—Relation of Southern Nature to Greek Mythology and Greek Art.—Rustic Life and Superstitions.—Feeling for Pure Nature in Theocritus.—How Distinguished from the same Feeling in Modern Poets.—Galatea.—Pharmaceutria.—Hylas.—Greek Chivalry.—The Dioscuri.—Thalysia.—Bion.—The Lament for Adonis.—Moschus.—Europa.—Megara.—Lament for Bion.—The Debts of Modern Poets to the Idyllists.	Page [240]
CHAPTER XXI.
THE ANTHOLOGY.
The History of its Compilation.—Collections of Meleager, Philippus, Agathias, Cephalas, Planudes.—The Palatine MS.—The Sections of the Anthology.—Dedicatory Epigrams.—Simonides.—Epitaphs: Real and Literary.—Callimachus.—Epigrams on Poets.—Antipater of Sidon.—Hortatory Epigrams.—Palladas.—Satiric Epigrams.—Lucillius.—Amatory Epigrams.—Meleager, Straton, Philodemus, Antipater, Rufinus, Paulus Silentiarius, Agathias, Plato.—Descriptive Epigrams.	Page [281]
CHAPTER XXII.
HERO AND LEANDER.
Virgil's Mention of this Tale.—Ovid and Statius.—Autumnal Poetry.—Confusion between the Mythical Musæus and the Grammarian.—The Introduction of the Poem.—Analysis of the Story.—Hallam's Judgment on Marlowe's Hero and Leander.—Comparison of Marlowe and Musæus.—Classic and Romantic Art.	Page [345]
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE GENIUS OF GREEK ART.
Separation between the Greeks and us.—Criticism.—Greek Sense of Beauty.—Greek Morality.—Greece, Rome, Renaissance, the Modern Spirit.	Page [363]
CHAPTER XXIV.
CONCLUSION.
Sculpture, the Greek Art par excellence.—Plastic Character of the Greek Genius.—Sterner Aspects of Greek Art.—Subordination of Pain and Discord to Harmony.—Stoic-Epicurean Acceptance of Life.—Sadness of Achilles in the Odyssey.—Endurance of Odysseus.—Myth of Prometheus.—Sir H. S. Maine on Progress.—The Essential Relation of all Spiritual Movement to Greek Culture.—Value of the Moral Attitude of the Greeks for us.—Three Points of Greek Ethical Inferiority.—The Conception of Nature.—The System of Marcus Aurelius.—Contrast with the Imitatio Christi.—The Modern Scientific Spirit.—Indestructible Elements in the Philosophy of Nature.	Page [391]

THE GREEK POETS.

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CHAPTER XIV.
GREEK TRAGEDY AND EURIPIDES.

Two Conditions for the Development of a National Drama.—The Attic Audience.—The Persian War.—Nemesis the Cardinal Idea of Greek Tragedy.—Traces of the Doctrine of Nemesis in Early Greek Poetry.—The Fixed Material of Greek Tragedy.—Athens in the Age of Euripides.—Changes introduced by him in Dramatic Art.—Law of Progress in all Art.—Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.—The Treatment of εὐψυχία by Euripides.—Menoikeus.—Death of Polyneices and Eteocles.—Polyxena.—Iphigenia.—Medea.—Hippolytus.—Electra and Orestes.—Lustspiele.—The Andromache.—The Dramas of Orestes.—Friendship and Pylades.—Injustice done to Euripides by Recent Critics.

The chapters on Æschylus and Sophocles have already introduced the reader to some of the principal questions regarding Attic tragedy in general. Yet the opening of a new volume justifies the resumption of this subject from the beginning, while the peculiar position of Euripides, in relation to his two great predecessors, suggests the systematic discussion of the religious ideas which underlay this supreme form of national art, as well as of the æsthetical rules which it obeyed in Greece.

Critics who are contented with referring the origin of the Greek drama to the mimetic instinct inherent in all humanity are apt to neglect those circumstances which render it an almost unique phenomenon in literature. If the mimetic instinct were all that is requisite for the origination of a national drama, then we might expect to find that every race at a certain period of its development produced both tragedy and comedy. This, however, is far from being the case. A certain rude mimesis, such as the acting of descriptive dances or the jesting of buffoons and mummers, is indeed common in all ages and nations. But there are only two races which can be said to have produced the drama as a fine art originally and independently of foreign influences. These are the Greeks and the Hindoos. With reference to the latter, it is even questionable whether they would have composed plays so perfect as their famous Sakountala without contact with Hellenic civilization. All the products of the modern drama, whether tragic or comic, must be regarded as the direct progeny of the Greek stage. The habit of play-acting, continued from Athens to Alexandria, and from Rome to Byzantium, never wholly expired. The "Christus Patiens," attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus, was an adaptation of the art of Euripides to Christian story; and the representation of "Mysteries" during the Middle Ages kept alive the dramatic tradition, until the discovery of classic literature and the revival of taste in modern Europe led to the great works of the English, Spanish, French, and subsequently of the German theatre.

Something more than the mere instinct of imitation, therefore, caused the Greeks to develop their drama. Like sculpture, like the epic, the drama was one of the artistic forms through which the genius of the Greek race expressed itself—by which, to use the language of philosophical mysticism, it fulfilled its destiny as a prime agent in the manifestation of the World-Spirit. In their realization of that perfect work of art for which they seem to have been specially ordained, the drama was no less requisite than sculpture and architecture, than the epic, the ode, and the idyl.

Two conditions, both of which the Greeks enjoyed in full perfection at the moment of their first dramatic energy, seem to be requisite for the production of a great and thoroughly national drama. These are, first, an era of intense activity or a period succeeding immediately to one of excitement, by which the nation has been nobly agitated; secondly, a public worthy of the dramatist spurring him on by its enthusiasm and intelligence to the creation of high works of art. A glance at the history of the drama in modern times will prove how necessary these conditions are. It was the gigantic effort which we English people made in our struggle with Rome and Spain, it was the rousing of our keenest thought and profoundest emotion by the Reformation, which prepared us for the Elizabethan drama, by far the greatest, next to the Greek, in literature. The nation lived in action, and delighted to see great actions imitated. Races in repose or servitude, like the Hebrews under the Roman empire, may, in their state of spiritual exaltation and by effort of pondering on the mysteries of God and man, give birth to new theosophies; but it requires a free and active race, in which young and turbulent blood is flowing, to produce a drama. In England, again, at that time, there was a great public. All classes crowded to the theatres. London, in whose streets and squares martyrs had been burned, on whose quays the pioneers of the Atlantic and Pacific, after disputing the Indies with Spain, lounged and enjoyed their leisure, supplied an eager audience, delighting in the dreams of poets which recalled to mind the realities of their own lives, appreciating the passion of tragedy, enjoying the mirth of comic incident. The men who listened to Othello had both done and suffered largely; their own experience was mirrored in the scenes of blood and struggle set before them. These two things, therefore—the awakening of the whole English nation to activity, and the presence of a free and haughty audience—made our drama great.

In the Spanish drama only one of the requisite conditions was fulfilled—activity. Before they began to write plays the Spaniards had expelled the Moors, discovered the New World, and raised themselves to the first place among European nations. But there was not the same free audience in Spain as in England. Papal despotism and the tyranny of the court checked and coerced the drama, so that, with all its richness and imaginative splendor, the Spanish theatre is inferior to the English. The French drama suffered still more from the same kind of restriction. Subject to the canons of scholastic pedants, tied down to an imitation of the antique, made to reflect the manners and sentiments of a highly artificial court, animated by the sympathies of no large national audience, the French playwrights became courtiers, artists obedient to the pleasures of a king—not, like the dramatists of Greece and England, the prophets of the people, the leaders of a chorus triumphant and rejoicing in its mighty deeds.

Italy has no real theatre. In Italy there has been no stirring of a national, united spirit; no supreme and central audience; no sudden consciousness of innate force and freedom in the sovereign people. The requisite conditions have always failed. The German drama, both by its successes and shortcomings, illustrates the same position. Such greatness as it achieved in Goethe and Schiller it owed to the fermentation of German nationality, to the so-called period of "storm and stress" which electrified the intellects of Germany and made the Germans eager to assert their manhood among nations. But listen to Goethe complaining that there was no public to receive his works; study the petty cabals of Weimar; estimate the imitative and laborious spirit of German art, and it is clear why Germany produced but scattered and imperfect results in the drama.

The examples of England, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, all tend to prove that for the creation of a drama it is necessary that the condition of national activity should be combined with the condition of a national audience—not an audience of courtiers or critics or learned persons. In Greece, both of these conditions were united in unrivalled and absolute perfection. While in England, during the Elizabethan period, the public which crowded our theatres were uncultivated, and formed but a small portion of the free nation they represented, in Athens the people, collectively and in a body, witnessed the dramatic shows provided for them in the theatre of Bacchus. The same set of men, when assembled in the Pnyx, constituted the national assembly; and in that capacity made laws, voted supplies, declared wars, ratified alliances, ruled the affairs of dependent cities. In a word, they were Athens. Every man among them—by intercourse with the greatest spirits of the Greek world in the agora and porches of the wrestling-grounds, by contemplation of the sculptures of Pheidias, by familiarity with Eleusinian processions, by participation in solemn sacrifices and choric dances, by listening to the recitations of Homer, by attendance on the lectures of the sophists, by debates in the ecclesia, by pleadings in the law-courts—had been multifariously educated and rendered capable of appreciating the subtleties of rhetoric and argument, as well as of comprehending the æsthetical beauty with which a Greek play was enriched. It is easy to imagine the influence which this potent, multitudinous, and highly cultivated audience must have exercised over the dramatists, and what an impulse it must have communicated to their genius. In England the playwright and the actor were both looked down upon with pity or contempt; they wrote and acted for money in private speculations, and in rivalry with several petty theatres. In Athens the tragedian was honored. Sophocles was elected a general with Pericles, and a member of the provisional government after the dissolution of the old democracy. The actor, too, was respected. The State itself defrayed the expenses of the drama, and no ignoble competition was possible between tragedian and tragedian, since all exhibited their plays to the same audience, in the same sacred theatre, and all were judged by the same judges.

The critical condition of the Greek people itself at the epoch of the drama is worth minute consideration. During the two previous centuries, the whole of Hellas had received a long and careful education: at the conclusion came the terrible convulsion of the Persian war. After the decay of the old monarchies, the Greek states seethed for years in the process of dissolution and reconstruction. The colonies had been founded. The aristocratic families had striven with the mob in every city; and from one or the other power at times tyrants had risen to control both parties and oppress the commonwealth. Out of these political disturbances there gradually arose a sense of law, a desire for established constitutions. There emerged at last the prospect of political and social stability. Meanwhile, in all departments of art and literature, the Greeks had been developing their genius. Lyrical, satirical, and elegiac poetry had been carried to perfection. The Gnomic poets and the Seven Sages had crystallized morality in apothegms. Philosophy had taken root in the colonies. Sculpture had almost reached its highest point. The Greek games, practised through nearly three hundred years, had created a sense of national unity. It seemed as if all the acquirements and achievements of the race had been spread abroad to form a solid and substantial base for some most comprehensive superstructure. Then, while Hellas was at this point of magnificent but still incomplete development, there followed, first, the expulsion of the Peisistratids from Athens, which aroused the spirit of that mighty nation, and then the invasion of Xerxes, which electrified the whole Greek world. It was this that inflamed the genius of Greece; this transformed the race of thinkers, poets, artists, statesmen, into a race of heroes, actors in the noblest sense of the word. The struggle with Persia, too, gave to Athens her right place. Assuming the hegemony of Hellas, to which she was fore-destined by her spiritual superiority, she flashed in the supreme moment which followed the battle of Salamis into the full consciousness of her own greatness. It was now, when the Persian war had made the Greeks a nation of soldiers, and had placed the crown on Athens, that the drama—that form of art which combines all kinds of poetry in one, which subordinates sculpture, painting, architecture, music, dancing, to its own use, and renders all arts subservient to the one end of action—appeared in its colossal majesty upon the Attic stage.

At this point of history the drama was a necessary product. The forces which had given birth to all the other forms of art were still exuberant and unexhausted, needing their completion. At the same time, nothing but the impassioned presentation of humanity in action could possibly have satisfied the men who had themselves enacted on the plains and straits of Attica the greatest and most artistic drama of real history. It was one of the chief actors of Marathon and Salamis who composed the Prometheus, and personated his own hero on the stage.

If we proceed to analyze the cardinal idea of Greek tragedy, we shall again observe the close connection which exists between the drama and the circumstances of the people at the time of its production. Schlegel, in his Lectures on the Drama, defines the prevailing idea of Greek tragedy to be the sense of an oppressive destiny—a fate against which the will of man blindly and vainly dashes. This conception of hereditary destiny seems to be strongly illustrated by many plays. Orestes, Œdipus, Antigone, are unable to escape their doom. Beautiful human heroism and exquisite innocence are alike sacrificed to the fatality attending an accursed house. Yet Schlegel has not gone far enough in his analysis. He has not seen that this inflexible fate is set in motion by a superior and anterior power, that it operates in the service of offended justice. When Œdipus slays his father, he does so in contempt of oracular warnings. Orestes, haunted by the Furies, has a mother's blood upon his hands, and unexpiated crimes of father and of grandsire to atone for. Antigone, the best of daughters and most loving of sisters, dies miserably, not dogged by Fate, but having of her own free will exposed her life in obedience to the pure laws of the heart. It is impossible to suppose that a Greek would have been satisfied with the bald fate-theory of Schlegel. Not fate, but Nemesis, was the ruling notion in Greek tragedy. A profound sense of the divine government of the world, of a righteous power punishing pride and vice, pursuing the children of the guilty to the tenth generation, but showing mercy to the contrite—in short, a mysterious and almost Jewish ideal of offended holiness pervades the whole work of the tragedians. This religious conception had gradually defined itself in the consciousness of the Greek race. Homer in both his epics presents us with the spectacle of crime punished. It is the sin of Paris and the obstinacy of the Trojan princes which lead to the fall of Troy. It is the insolence of the suitors in the Odyssey which brings them to their death. The Cyclical poets seem to have dwelt on the same theme. The storm which fell on the Achaian fleet, dispersing or drowning the heroes, was a punishment for their impiety and pride during the sack of Troy. The madness of Ajax followed his violence upon Cassandra. When conscious morality begins in Greece the idea is at once made prominent. Hesiod continually insists on justice, whose law no man may violate unpunished. The Gnomic poets show how guilt, if unavenged at the moment, brings calamity upon the offspring of the evil-doer. This notion of an inheritance of crime is particularly noticeable, since it tinged the whole tragedy of the Greeks. Solon, again, in his dialogue with Crœsus, develops another aspect of the same idea. With him the Deity is jealous of all towering greatness, of all insolent prosperity; his Nemesis punishes the pride of wealth and the lust of life. Some of the most prominent personages of Greek tragedy—Creon, Œdipus, Theseus, Agamemnon—illustrate this phase of the idea. In the sayings of the Seven Sages we trace another shade of the conception. All of them insist on moderation, modesty, the right proportion, the due mean. The lyrists take up a somewhat different position. The vicissitudes of life, both independent of and connected with personal guilt, fascinate their imagination. They have a deep and awful sense of sudden catastrophes. Pindar rises to a loftier level: his odes are pervaded by reverence for a holy power, before whom the insolent are forced to bow, by whom the humble are protected and the good rewarded.

Such are the traces of a doctrine of Nemesis to be found in all the literature of the pre-dramatic period. That very event which determined the sudden splendor of the drama gave a sublime and terrific sanction to the already existing morality. The Persian war exhibited the downfall of a haughty and insolent race, cut off in all its pomp and power. Before the eyes of the men who witnessed the calamities of Œdipus and Agamemnon on the stage, the glory of godless Asia had vanished like a dream. Thus the idea of Nemesis quelling the insolent and smiting the unholy was realized in actual history; and to add to the impression produced on Greek imagination by the destruction of the Persian hosts, Pheidias carved his statue of Nemesis to be a monument in enduring marble of the national morality. Æschylus erected an even more majestic monument to the same principle in his tragedies.[1]

Nemesis is the fundamental idea of the Greek drama. It appears strongest in Æschylus, as a prophetic and awful law, mysteriously felt and terribly revealed. Sophocles uses it to point the deep moralities which govern human life. In Euripides it degenerates into something more akin to a sense of vicissitudes; it becomes more sentimental—less a religious or moral principle than a phenomenon inspiring fear and pity. This sequence appears to be necessary in the growth and expansion of a primitive idea. Rugged and superstitious at first, it is next harmonized and humanized, and ends at last in being merely artistic.

In Æschylus the fundamental moral law of Nemesis, as a part of the divine government of the world, is set forth in three distinct manifestations. We find it expressed mythologically, as abstract and ideal, in the Prometheus. The offence of Prometheus against Zeus, though unselfish and generous, must be expiated by suffering; the rebellious demi-god must be brought at last to merge his will in that of Zeus, to bind his brows with the willow of submission, and to place upon his finger the iron ring of necessity. We find it expressed typically, as still ideal and almost superhuman, in the Oresteia. Here a whole family is vitiated by the offence of their first ancestor. The hereditary curse is renewed and fortified from generation to generation, by the sins of the children, until at last a reconciliation is effected between the purifying deities and the infernal powers of vengeance. In the Persæ the same law is exhibited as a fact of contemporary history. It is no longer a matter of mythology, as in the Prometheus, or a matter of heroic legend, as in the Oresteia, but a matter of actual experience, that the godless man should suffer and involve the innocent in his disaster. Thus the law of Nemesis is displayed as an eternal verity in the Prometheus; and in the Oresteia it is actualized and humanized within the region of heroic legend; in the Persæ it is used for the explanation of every-day events. The pedigree of inherited crime and vengeance, as explained in the choruses of the Oresteia, and as illustrated by the whole history of the Tantalidæ, is this.[2] The pride of wealth in the first instance swells the heart, and inclines its possessor to ungodly thoughts. This leads to impiety (τὸ δυσσεβές), and in the energetic language of the Agamemnon[3] the arrogant man kicks with his heel against the altar of Justice. A state of presumptuous insolence (ὕβρις) is the result of the original unholiness. And now the man, who has been corrupted in his soul, is ready for the commission of some signal crime. Ate, or a blindness of the reason, which prevents him from foreseeing the consequences of his acts, is the child of this presumption. Inspired by Ate, he sheds the blood of his brother, or defiles his sister's bed; and from this moment the seed is sown which will spring up and breed fresh mischief for each successive generation. After the spilling of blood the affair passes into the hands of the Erinnyes, whose business it is to beset the house of the guilty doer. They form the bloody revel, which, though glutted with gore, refuse to quit the palace of Atreus. They leap upon it from above, and rack it like a tempest. Yet from their power there is escape. The curse of the house works; but it works only through the impure. Should a man arise capable of seeing rightly and living purely, he may work off the curse and become free. Such a man was Orestes. The leading thought in this system of morality is that pride begets impiety, impiety produces an insolent habit of mind, which culminates in blindness; the fruit of this blindness is crime, breeding crime from sire to son. It is only when the righteous man appears, who performs an act of retributive justice, in obedience to divine mandates, and without the indulgence of any selfish passion, that the curse is stayed.

Such is a crude sketch of the Æschylean theory of Nemesis, as set forth in the great trilogy. To Æschylus, the presentation of the moral law conceived by him is of even more importance than the exhibition of the characters of men controlled by it. This is not the case with Sophocles. He fixes our attention upon the ἁμαρτία, or error of the guilty man, interests us in the qualities by which he was betrayed into sin, and makes us feel that suffering is the inevitable consequence of arrogant or wilful acts. The weakness of the offender is more prominent in Sophocles than the vengeance of the outraged deity. Thus, although there is the sternest religious background to all the tragedies of Sophocles, our attention is always fixed upon the humanity of his heroes. The house of Labdacus is involved in hereditary guilt. Laius, despising an oracle, begets a son by Jocasta, and is slain by that son. Œdipus, in his youthful recklessness, careless of oracular warnings, kills his father and weds his mother. Jocasta, through her levity and impiety, is hurried into marriage with the murderer of her husband, who is also her own son. All this αὐθαδία, or headstrong wilfulness, is punished by the descent of a fearful plague on Thebes; and Œdipus, whose heat of temper and self-reliance are his only serious crime, is overpowered by the abyss of misery into which these faults have plunged his people and his family. The utter prostration of Œdipus—when his eyes have been opened to the tissue of horrors he has woven round himself, his mother, his nation, and his children—is the first step in his moral discipline. He abdicates in favor of the insolent Creon, and goes forth to wander, an abhorred and helpless blind man, on the face of the earth. When, at the conclusion of his pariah life, the citizens of Colonus refuse him harborage, he only cries: "My deeds were rather sufferings than crimes." His old heroic haughtiness and headstrong will are tempered to a noble abhorrence of all baseness, to a fiery indignation. He has been purged and lessoned to humility before the throne of Zeus. Therefore, in return for his self-annihilation, the gods at last receive him to their company, and constitute him a blessed dæmon in the place of his disgrace. It was the highest triumph of tragic art to exhibit that new phase in the character of Œdipus which marks the conclusion of the Tyrannus and is sustained in the Colonëus. In both of these plays, Œdipus is the same man; but circumstances have so wrought upon his temper as to produce a great change. Still, the change is only commensurate with the force of the circumstances. We comprehend it, while at the same time we are forced to marvel at the profound skill of the poet, who, in the first tragedy, has presented to our eyes the hot-tempered king reduced to abject humiliation, and in the second has shown us the same man dignified, and purified by the dealings of the heavy hand of God. Set aside by his calamity, and severed from the common lot of men, Œdipus has submitted to the divine will and has communed with unseen powers. He is therefore now environed with a treble mystery—with the mystery of his awful past, the mystery of his god-conducted present, the mystery of his august future. It was by such masterly delineation of character that Sophocles threw the old Æschylean dogma of Nemesis into the background, and moralized his tragedy without sacrificing an iota of its religious force. Aristotle, speaking of the highest tragic art, says that its object is to represent an ἦθος, a permanent habit of moral temper. Careless or bad art allows impossible incongruities in the delineation of character, whereas the true poet maintains identity throughout. If this be so, Sophocles deserves the title of ἠθικώτατος in the very highest sense. As a further illustration of the divergence of Sophocles from the Æschylean dogma of Nemesis, it is worth while to mention the Antigone. This play takes us beyond the region of hereditary guilt into the sphere of moral casuistry; its tragic interest depends not upon the evolution of an ancestral curse, although Antigone is incidentally involved in the crime of her brothers, but upon the conflict of duties in a single heart. Antigone, while obeying the law of her conscience, is disobeying the command of her sovereign. She acted rightly; yet her offence was sufficient to cause her legal death, and this death she chose with open eyes. It is in the person of Creon that the old moral of Nemesis is drawn. Like Œdipus, he treats the warnings of Teiresias with scorn, and persists in his criminal persecution of the dead Polyneices. Shaken at last by the seer's vaticinations, he rescinds his orders, but too late. Antigone has hanged herself in prison; Hæmon curses his father, and stabs himself upon her corpse; Eurydice, maddened with grief, puts an end to her own life; and thus the house of the tyrant is left unto him desolate. It is quite impossible by any phrases of mere criticism to express the admiration which every student of Sophocles must feel for the profundity of his design, for the unity of his art, and for the firmness with which he has combined the essential religious doctrines of Greek tragedy with his own ethical philosophy.

In passing to Euripides we feel how much we have lost. The religious foundation has been broken up; the clear intuitive morality of Sophocles has been exchanged for sophistry, debate, hypothesis, and paradox. In the delineation of character he wavers; not because he could not create well-sustained types, since Medea, Hippolytus, and many other Euripidean personages display sublime and massive unity; but because, apparently owing to the rapid development of the dramatic art and the speculative ferment of the age in which he lived, he was more interested in the creation of plots and situations, in the discussion of vexed questions, and in the critical rehandling of apparently exhausted motives, than in the exhibition of the truly tragic ἦθος. The praise bestowed on him by Aristotle as being τραγικώτατος, proves that his contemporaries had recognized this source of both his weakness and his strength.

While considering the work done by the three great tragic authors, we must not forget that the Greek dramatists adhered to a fixed body of legends; the tales of the House of Atreus, of Troy, of the family of Laius at Thebes, of Herakles, of Jason, and of Theseus, formed the staple of the plays of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. This fact helps to account for the early decline of the Greek drama. It was impossible for the successors of Æschylus and Sophocles to surpass them in the heroic treatment of the same mythical motives. Yet custom and tradition, the religious antecedents of tragedy, the cumbrous apparatus of mask and buskin and Bacchic robe, the conventional chorus, the very size of the theatre, the whole form, in fact, of Greek dramatic art, rendered a transition from the heroic to the romantic tragedy impossible. Those fixed legends which Æschylus had used as the framework for his religious philosophy of Nemesis and Ate, from which Sophocles had drawn deep lessons of morality, had to be employed by Euripides as best he might. On their firmly traced, inflexible outlines he embroidered his own work of pathos and imagination, losing sight of the divine element, blurring morality, but producing a world of fanciful yet living shapes of sentiment and thought and passion.

If we seek to comprehend the position of Euripides in relation to his predecessors, we must consider the changes which had taken place in Athens between the period of the Persian war and that in which he flourished. All the mutations of Greek history were accomplished with celerity; but in this space of less than half a century the rate of progress was nothing less than marvellous, and the evolution of the Attic drama through its three great tragedians was accomplished with a rapidity which is quite miraculous. Æschylus gained his first prize in 484 B.C., Sophocles his first in 468 B.C., Euripides his first in 441 B.C. The Medea of Euripides, a play which exhibits all the innovations of its author, appeared in 431 B.C. Therefore a period of fifty-three years sufficed for the complete development of the greatest work of art the world has ever witnessed. The history of our own stage offers a parallel to this extraordinary rapidity of growth. Marlowe produced his Tamburlaine in 1590, Ford his Lover's Melancholy in 1628: between these two dates—that is to say, within the compass of thirty-eight years—were composed all the plays of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Webster, Heywood, Decker, Marston, Chapman, Middleton, and others whom it would be tedious to mention. Halliwell's Dictionary of Old English Plays contains two hundred and eighty closely printed pages; yet very few of the pieces he enumerates are subsequent to what we call Elizabethan. But, though our drama, in respect of fertility, offers a parallel to that of Athens, we can show no three poets of paramount genius corresponding to Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, each of whom would have been sufficient by himself to mark a century in the growth of the genius of his nation. Between Æschylus and Sophocles there is a wide chasm in religion, politics, and art; between Sophocles and Euripides, again, there is a chasm in religion, politics, art, and philosophy. Yet Sophocles, after superseding Æschylus, lived to put on mourning for the death of Euripides. Some of the men of Marathon yet remained when Aristophanes was writing, both to point his moral against Euripides, and also to prove by contrast with the generation that had grown up since how impossible it was for the poet of the present to vie with the Æschylus of the past. In the first place, Athens had become the centre of progressive thought. Teachers of rhetoric and reasoning made her wrestling-grounds and gardens the scene of their disputes and lectures. The arts of eloquence were studied by the youth who in a previous age had been contented with Homer. At Athens, Anaxagoras had questioned the divinity of Helios, and had asserted reason to be the moving force of the universe. Sophists who taught the arts of life for money, and philosophers who subjected morals to ingenious analysis, and explained away on scientific principles the ancient myths of Greek nature-worship, combined to disturb ethical and religious traditions. A more solid, because more reasoned, morality was springing up perhaps. A purer monotheism was being inculcated. But meanwhile the old Hellenic customs and the fabric of mythic theology were undermined. It could not be but that the poet of the day should participate in these changes. In the second place, the Athenian populace had grown to be supreme in two departments—the high parliament of State and the law-courts. Every Athenian was now far more than formerly an orator or judge of orators, an advocate or judge of advocates. Two passions possessed the popular mind: the passion for the assembly with its stormy debate and pompous declamation; the passion for the dikastery with its personal interests, its problems of casuistical law, its momentous tragedies of private life, its studied eloquence. Talking and listening were the double function of an Athenian citizen. To speak well on every subject, so as to gain causes in the courts, and to persuade the people in the Pnyx; to criticise speeches with acumen, so as not to be deluded by specious arguments: these were the prime accomplishments of an Athenian youth of promise. It is obvious that a very peculiar audience was thus formed for the tragedian—an audience greedy of intellectual subtleties, of pathetic situations, of splendid oratory, of clever reasoning—an audience more appreciative of the striking than the true, of the novel than the natural. In the third place, the Athenians had waxed delicate and wanton since the Persian war. When Æschylus began to write, the peril of utter ruin hung like a stone of Tantalus over Hellas. That removed, the Greeks breathed freely. The Athenians, growing in wealth and power, neglected the old moderation of their ancestors. Youths who in earlier days would have fared hardly now drove their chariots, backed their fighting-cocks, and followed their own sweet will. Aristotle quaintly enough observes that the flute had become fashionable after the expulsion of the Persians. The poet of the day could no longer be austere like Æschylus or sedate like Sophocles.

In all these changes Euripides partook. The pupil in rhetoric of Prodicus, in philosophy of Anaxagoras and Heraclitus, a book-collector, a student of painting, the friend of Socrates, cultivated in all innovations of morality and creed, Euripides belonged essentially to his own day. As far as a tragic dramatist can be the mouthpiece of his age, Euripides was the mouthpiece of Athenian decline. For this reason, because he so exactly expressed the feelings and opinions of his time, which feelings and opinions produced a permanent national habit of mind, Euripides became the darling of posterity. Æschylus was the Titanic product of a bygone period; Sophocles displayed the pure and perfect ideal; but Euripides was the artist who, without improving on the spirit of his age, gave it a true and adequate expression. The only wonder is that during his lifetime Euripides was not more popular at Athens. His comparative neglect proves him to have been somewhat in advance of his century, and justifies Aristophanes in the reproach that he anticipated the Athenians in the break-up of their forms of thought.

At this point we may consider the condition of the tragic art when Euripides took it up as the business of his life. Though tragedy, as formed by Æschylus, represented one true and important aspect of Greek thought—the religious—yet it could never have been adequate to the life of the whole nation in the same degree as the many-sided drama of Shakespeare, for example, was to that of our Elizabethan ancestors. Its regularity and solemnity tended to make it an ideal work of art. It might arouse the religious feeling, the national pride, the enthusiasm for a legendary past, which were so powerful among the Athenians of the Marathonian epoch. But it could not have had much attraction for the Athenians of the Syracusan expedition. As men subject to the divine rule, indeed, it had a message fraught with meaning for them; but as Athenians of to-day it did not touch them. We can well believe that this lofty, ceremonious art fatigued a large portion of the Attic audience. After having listened to some seventy plays of Æschylus and fifty of Sophocles, not to mention Phrynichus and Chœrilus, and scores of minor dramatists, all teaching the same religious morality, and all obeying the same æsthetic principles, we can conceive that a merry Greek began to long for novelty. It must have required the supreme genius of a Sophocles to sustain the attention of the audience at its ancient altitude. In the hands of inferior poets, the tragic commonplaces must have appeared insipid. Some change seemed absolutely necessary. Euripides, a poet of very distinguished originality, saw that he must adapt his dramatic style to the new requirements of his audience, and give them what they liked, even though it were not good for them. The sophistic arguments, the strained situations, the law-court pleadings, the pathetic touches, the meretricious lyrics, the philosophical explanations, the sententious epigrams, the theatrical effects, which mar his tragedies, were deliberate innovations on the old pure style. Euripides had determined to bring tragedy home to the hearts and understandings of the spectators. All the peculiarities of his art flow from this one aim. This is the secret of what may be described as his romantic realism, his twofold appeal to sympathy by the invention of startling incident and by the faithful delineation of vulgar life and common character. Whether he did not pursue this aim on a false method, whether he might not have aroused the sympathies of his audience without debasing tragedy, remains a fit matter for debate.

Entirely to eliminate the idea of Nemesis, which gave its character to Greek tragedy, was what Euripides, had he been so inclined, could hardly have succeeded in effecting. Though he never impresses on our minds the dogma of an avenging deity, like Æschylus, or of an inevitable law, like Sophocles, he makes us feel the chance and change of human life, the helplessness of man, the stormy sea of passions, sorrows, and vicissitudes on which the soul is tossed. Conventional phrases about moderation in all things, retributive justice, and the like, are used to keep up the old tragic form. In this way he brought tragedy down to the level of real life, wherein we do not trace the visible finger of Providence, but where all seems at least confusion to the natural eye. Euripides no more than Shakespeare sought to be a prophet or interpreter of the divine operations. In the same spirit he treated his materials with freedom. Adhering conventionally, and as a form of art, to the mythical legends of Hellas—that charmed circle beyond which the tragic muse had never strayed—he adapted them to his own purposes. He gave new characters to the principal heroes,[4] mixed up legendary incidents with trivial domestic scenes, lowered the language of demigods to current Greek talk, hazarded occasional scepticism, and introduced familiar phrases into ceremonious debates. The sacred character of the myths disappeared; Euripides used them as so many masses of entertaining folklore and fiction, fit for tragic handling. In some instances, as, for example, in the Ion and the ending of the Hippolytus, he may even have intended an attack upon the ethics they had sanctioned. When we hear Achilles and Orestes talking like Athenian citizens, wrangling, perorating, subtilizing, seeking victory in strife of words, trifling with questions of profoundest import, and settling moral problems by verbal quibbles, we understand the remark of Sophocles that he had painted men as they ought to be, Euripides as they are. Medea and Alcestis are not the mythical Medea or the legendary queen of Pheræ, but an injured wife, and a devoted wife, just such as Shakespeare or Balzac might have depicted. Menelaus is invariably a faint-hearted, smooth-spoken, treasonable, uxorious, vain man. Only in the Helena, when fairly driven to bay, does he show the pluck of a soldier. Nothing can be more contemptible than the Agamemnon of Iphigenia in Aulide. He is a feeble, double-minded dastard, who has aspired to the commandership in chief from motives of vulgar ambition, and who finds himself unable to hold his own against cabal and mutiny. This is perhaps a development of the Homeric conception, but with all the Homeric radiance, the dignity that shields a monarch from disgrace, omitted. But unfortunately for this attempt to make Greek tragedy more real and living, more representative of the actual world, the cothurnus, the mask, the chorus, the thymelé, the gigantic stage, remained. All the cumbrous paraphernalia of the Æschylean theatre environed the men and women of Euripides, who cut but a poor figure in the garb of demigods. In trying to adapt the mould of Greek tragedy to real life, Euripides overpassed the limits of possibility. The mould broke in his hands.

The same inevitable divergence from the Æschylean system is observable in every department of the tragedy of Euripides. While Sophocles had diminished the direct interposition of mysterious agencies, so frequently invoked by Æschylus, and had interested his audience in human character controlled and tempered by an unseen will of God, Euripides went further. With him the affairs of life are no longer based upon a firm foundation of divine law, but gods intervene mechanically and freakishly, like the magicians in Ariosto or Tasso.[5] Their agency is valuable, not as determining the moral conduct of the personages, but as an exhibition of supernatural power which brings about a sudden revolution of events. Independently of their miraculous activity, the human agents display all varieties of character: every shade of virtue and vice is delicately portrayed; pathetic scenes are multiplied; the tendernesses of domestic life are brought prominently forward; mixed motives and conflicting passions are skilfully analyzed. Consequently the plays of Euripides are more rich in stirring incidents than those of his predecessors. What we lose in gravity and unity is made up for by versatility. Euripides, to use a modern phrase, is more sensational than either Æschylus or Sophocles. Aristotle called him τραγικώτατος, by which he probably meant that he was most profuse of touching and exciting scenes.

The same tendencies strike us in the more formal department of the tragic art. Here, as elsewhere, Euripides moves a step beyond Sophocles, breaking the perfection of poetic harmony for the sake of novelty and effect. Euripides condescended to stage tricks. It is well known how Aristophanes laughed at him for the presentation of shabby-genteel princes and monarchs out-at-elbow.[6] Having no deep tragic destiny for the groundwork of his drama, he sought to touch the spectators by royalty in ruins and wealth reduced to beggary. The gorgeous scenic shows in which Æschylus had delighted, but which he had invariably subordinated to his subject, and which Sophocles, with the tact of a supreme master in beauty, had managed to dispense with, were lavished by Euripides. One play of his, the Troades, has absolutely no plot. Such attraction as it possesses it owes to the rapid succession of pathetic situations and splendid scenes, the whole closing with the burning of the towers of Troy.

By curtailing the function of the Chorus, Euripides separated from the action of the drama that element which in Æschylus had been chiefly useful for the inculcation of the moral of the play. On the other hand, by expanding the function of the Messenger he was able to indulge his faculty for brilliant description. It has been well said, that the ear and not the eye was the chosen vehicle of pathos to the Greeks. This remark is fully justified by the narrative passages in the plays of Euripides—passages of poetry unsurpassed for radiance, swiftness, strength, pictorial effect. The account of the Bacchic revels among the mountains of Cithæron, and of the death of Pentheus in the Bacchæ, that of the death of Glauke in Medea, and of Hippolytus in the play that bears his name, that of the sacrifice of Polyxena in the Hecuba, that of Orestes and Pylades laying hands on Helen in the Orestes, and many others, prove with what consummate skill the third of the great tragic poets seized upon a field within the legitimate province of his art as yet but imperfectly occupied by his predecessors.

Another novelty was the use of the prologue. Here, again, Euripides expanded the already existing elements in Greek tragedy beyond their power of enduring the strain he put upon them. In their drama the Greek poets did not aim at surprise; the spectators were expected to be familiar beforehand with the subject of the play. But when the plot became more complicated and the incidents more varied under the hands of Euripides, a prologue was the natural expedient, in perfect harmony with the stationary character of Greek tragedy, for placing the audience at the point of view intended by the poets.

The solution of the tragic situation by the intervention of a god at the conclusion of the play, familiarly known as the deus ex machinâ, was too frequently adopted by Euripides. The speeches of these divine beings are always formal and uninteresting. Their interference is felt to be mechanical, and the settlement of human difficulties effected by them leaves an ineffaceable impression of littleness. It reminds us of that pinch of dust upon the warring hive which Virgil described with exquisite irony. The deus ex machinâ existed potentially in previous Greek tragedy, and Euripides is less to be blamed for the employment of this device than for the abuse of it. He did not take enough pains to prepare for the appearance of the deity by dramatic motives, and he had recourse to it too often. It is probable that the theatrical effect gratified his audience, and prevented them from calling in question the artistic justification of so novel and exciting a stage spectacle.

In all these changes it will be evident that Euripides, wisely or unwisely, obtained originality by carrying his art beyond the point which it had reached under his predecessors. Using a simile, we might compare the drama of Æschylus to the sublime but rugged architecture which is called Norman, that of Sophocles to the most refined and perfect pointed style, that of Euripides to a highly decorated—florid and flamboyant—manner. Æschylus aimed at durability of structure, at singleness and grandeur of effect. Sophocles added the utmost elegance and finish. Euripides neglected force of construction and unity of design for ornament and brilliancy of effect. But he added something of his own, something infinitely precious and enduringly attractive. The fault of his style consisted in a too exclusive attention to the parts. We are also often made to feel that he fails by not concentrating his whole strength upon the artistic motives of his plays. He has too many side-thrusts at political and ethical questions, too many speculative and critical digressions, too much logomachy and metaphysical debate.

The object of the foregoing remarks has been to show how and to what extent Euripides departed from the form and essence of Greek tragedy. It may sound paradoxical now to assert that it was a merit in him rather than a defect to have sacrificed the unity of art to the development of subordinate beauties. Yet it seems to me that in no other way could the successor of Æschylus and Sophocles have made himself the true exponent of his age, have expanded to the full the faculties still latent in Greek tragedy, or have failed to "affect the fame of an imitator." The law of inevitable progression in art, from the severe and animated embodiment of an idea to the conscious elaboration of merely æsthetic motives and brilliant episodes, has hitherto been neglected by the critics and historians of poetry. They do not observe that the first impulse in a people towards creativeness is some deep and serious emotion, some fixed point of religious enthusiasm or national pride. To give adequate form to this taxes the energies of the first generation of artists, and raises their poetic faculty, by the admixture of prophetic inspiration, to the highest pitch. After the original passion for the ideas to be embodied in art has somewhat subsided, but before the glow and fire of enthusiasm have faded out, there comes a second period, when art is studied more for art's sake, but when the generative potency of the earlier poets is by no means exhausted. For a moment the artist at this juncture is priest, prophet, hierophant, and charmer, all in one. More conscious of the laws of beauty than his predecessors, he makes some sacrifice of the idea to meet the requirements of pure art; but he never forgets that beauty by itself is insufficient to a great and perfect work, nor has he lost his interest in the cardinal conceptions which vitalize the most majestic poetry. During the first and second phases which I have indicated, the genius of a nation throws out a number of masterpieces—some of them rough-hewn and Cyclopean, others perfect in their combination of the strength of thought with grace and elevated beauty. But the mine of ideas is exhausted. The national taste has been educated. Conceptions which were novel to the grandparents have become the intellectual atmosphere of the grandchildren. It is now impossible to return upon the past—to gild the refined gold, or to paint the lily of the supreme poets. Their vigor may survive in their successors; but their inspiration has taken form forever in their poems. What, then, remains for the third generation of artists? They have either to reproduce their models—and this is stifling to true genius; or they have to seek novelty at the risk of impairing the strength or the beauty which has become stereotyped. Less deeply interested in the great ideas by which they have been educated, and of which they are in no sense the creators, incapable of competing on the old ground with their elders, they are obliged to go afield for striking situations, to force sentiment and pathos, to subordinate the harmony of the whole to the melody of the parts, to sink the prophet in the poet, the hierophant in the charmer.

This law of sequence is widely applicable. It will be seen to control the history of all uninterrupted artistic dynasties. Greek sculpture, for example, passes from the austere, through the perfect, to the simply elegant. The artist of the Æginetan pediment was wholly intent upon the faithful representation of heroic incidents. The event filled his mind: he sought to express it as energetically as he could. Pheidias stands on the ground of accomplished art. The mythus selected for treatment is developed with perfect fidelity, but also with regard to æsthetical effect. Praxiteles neglects the event, the substance of the mythus. His interest in that has languished, and has been supplanted by enthusiasm for mere forms of beauty. He lavishes a Pheidian wealth of genius on separate figures and situations of no great import except for their consummate loveliness. In architecture, the genealogy of the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders points to the same law. Take another instance from modern painting. Giotto, Raphael, Correggio, differ less perhaps in actual calibre than in relative historical position. Giotto, intent upon the fundamental ideas of Christian mythology, determines to express them forcibly, faithfully, earnestly, without regarding aught but the best method of investing them with harmony, lucidity, and dignity. Raphael ascends a step, and combines the strength and purity of Giotto with elaborate beauty and classic finish of style. Correggio at his appearance finds all the great work done. The Christian mythus has been adequately set forth by his predecessors. He is driven to become the thaumaturgist of chiaroscuro, the audacious violator of unity in composition, the supreme painter of erotic paradise. Further development of the religious idea beyond that achieved by Raphael was impossible. Already in Raphael's work a compromise between religious austerity and pagan grace had been observable. The simplicity of Giotto was gone beyond recapture. Correggio could only be original by carrying onward to its ultimate perfection the element of beauty for its own sake introduced by Raphael. Like Euripides, Correggio was condemned to the misfortune of separating beauty from the idea, the body from the spirit. With them the forces inherent in the germs of their respective arts were exhausted. But those who rightly understand them must, we imagine, be prepared to accept with gratitude the existence of Correggio and Euripides, both as complementing Giotto and Æschylus, and also as accounting for the meridian splendor of Sophocles and Raphael. Without the cadence of Euripides the majestic aria of Sophocles would hardly be played out. By studying the Correggiosity of Correggio we comprehend how much of mere æsthetic beauty is held in solution in the work of Raphael. It is thus, as it were, that, like projectiles, arts describe their parabolas and end.

To return in detail to the Greek tragedians. Æschylus determines at all hazards to exhibit the chosen mythus in its entirety, and to give full prominence to his religious idea. Hence we have to put up with much that is tedious—a whole Choëphorœ, for example. But hence the unrivalled majesty of the Agamemnon. Sophocles manipulates his subject more artistically, so as to make it harmonious without losing sight of its internal source of unity. But he already begins to disintegrate the colossal work of Æschylus—notably in his separation of the trilogy and in his moralizing of the idea of Nemesis. With Euripides the disintegration is complete. He neglects the mythus altogether. The theosophy of Æschylus, always implicit in Sophocles, survives as a mere conventionality in the work of Euripides. Finally, like Praxiteles, he carves single statues of eminent beauty; like Correggio, he conceals his poverty of design beneath a mass of redundant elegance. What we have really to regret in the art of Euripides is that he should have endeavored to compete at all with Æschylus and Sophocles upon the old ground of the tales of Thebes and Troy. Where he breaks new ground, as in the Medea, the Hippolytus, and the Bacchæ, he proves himself a consummate master. Here the novelty of his method shocks no sense of traditional propriety. He is not driven to flippant paradox or sarcastic scepticism in dealing with time-honored myths, or to travesties of well-marked characters, in order to assert his individuality. These plays exhibit a complete unity of outward form, and a profound internal unity of passion and character. They are not surpassed in their own kind by anything that any other poet had produced; and if "the chef-d'œuvre be adequate to the chef-d'œuvre," Euripides may here be pronounced the rival of Sophocles and Shakespeare.

To enter into an elaborate analysis of Euripides as a poet would be beyond the scope of this essay, which has for its subject the relation of the third great dramatist to his predecessors and to Greek tragedy in general. Yet something must be added to justify the opinion just expressed, that, though Euripides suffered by the constraint under which he labored in competition with rivals who had nearly exhausted the resources of the tragic art, yet he displays beauties of his own of such transcendent merit as to place him in the first rank of the poets of the world. It would be a delightful task to attempt to do him justice in the teeth of a malevolent generation of critics, led by Schlegel and Müller, who do not understand him—to summon from the shadows of the Attic stage the "magnificent witch" Medea, pure-souled Polyxena, wifely Alcestis, fiery-hearted Phædra, chaste and cold Hippolytus, Andromache upon her chariot a royal slave, Orestes in his agony soothed by a sister's ministrations, the sunny piety of Ion, the self-devotion of Menoikeus—intermingling perchance these pictured forms, pure, statuesque and clear as frescos from Pompeii, with choric odes and exquisite descriptions. The lyrics of Euripides are among the choicest treasures of Greek poetry: they flow like mountain rivulets flashing with sunbeams, eddying in cool, shady places, rustling through leaves of mint, forget-me-not, marsh-marigold, and dock. His landscapes are most vivid: in ancient poetry there is nothing to compete with the pictures of Cithæron, where the Bacchantes lie limb-length beneath the silver-firs, their snakes asleep, and the mountain air ruffling their loose curls; or with the cave of Polyphemus, where the satyrs lead their flocks from pasture up the valley between stone-pine and chestnut-tree to the lawns that overhang dark purple sea-waves. In the department of the picturesque Euripides is unrivalled. His paintings have the truth to nature, the delicately modulated outline, and the facile grace of the most perfect bass-reliefs or frescos.

But to attempt this labor of criticism would be to write a book upon Euripides. It must be enough in this place to illustrate one quality which occupies a large space in the dramatic ethics of Euripides, and forms the motive of the action of his leading characters. The old religious basis of Nemesis having been virtually abandoned by him, Euripides fell back upon the morality of passions and emotions. For his cardinal virtue he chose what the Greeks call εὐψυχία, stoutheartedness, pluck in the noblest sense of the word—that temper of the soul which prepared the individual to sacrifice himself for the State, and to triumph in pain or death or dogged endurance rather than give way to feebler instincts. That this quality should be prominent in Euripides is not without significance. Not only did it enable him to construct most thrilling scenes: it also harmonized with the advancing tendencies of Greek philosophy, which already held within itself the germs of Stoicism—or the theory of καρτερία.[7] But in his dramatic handling of the motive he softened its harder outlines by touches of exquisite unselfishness, converting adamantine firmness into almost tremulous devotion. One of the most pathetic exhibitions of this virtue occurs in the Phœnissæ. The Seven Captains are beleaguering Thebes, and affairs are going ill with the garrison. Teiresias, however, prophesies that if Creon's son, Menoikeus, will kill himself, Thebes must triumph. Creon accepts the prophecy, but seeks to save his son; he sends for Menoikeus and instructs him how he may escape to Dodona. Menoikeus pretends to agree with what his father counsels, and, after true Euripidean fashion, sends Creon to get his journey-money. Then the boy, left alone upon the stage, turns to the Chorus and begins his speech:

How well have I my father's fears allayed
With fraudulent words to compass my own will!
Lo, he would filch me hence, with shame to me,
Loss to my fatherland. An old man's heart
Deserves some pity.—What pity can I claim
If I betray the land that gave me birth?
Know then that I shall go and save the state,
Giving my life and dying for this land.
For this is shameful; if beneath no ban
Of oracles, bound by no force of fate,
But standing to their shields, men dare to die
Under the ramparts of the town they love;
While I, untrue to brother and to sire,
And to my country, like a felon slink
Far hence in exile! Lo, where'er I roam,
All men would call me coward! By great Zeus,
Who dwells among the stars, by bloody Ares,
Who made the dragon-seed in days of old
Lords of the land, I swear this shall not be!
But I will go, and on the topmost towers
Standing, will dash into the murky den
Where couched the dragon, as the prophet bade.
Thus will I free my country. I have spoken.
See, then, I leave you: it is no mean gift
In death I give the city; but my land
I purge of sickness. If all men were bold
Of their good things to work the public weal,
I ween our towns had less of ills to bear,
And more of blessings for all days to be.

With the Phœnissæ in our hands, one other passage may be translated which displays the power possessed by Euripides of composing a dramatic picture, and presenting pathos to the eye. Eteocles and Polyneices have been wounded to the death. Jocasta, their mother, and Antigone, their sister, go forth to the battlefield to find them:

Then rushed their wretched mother on the twain;
And seeing them thus wounded unto death,
Wailed: "O my sons! too late, too late I come
To succor you!" Then, clasping them by turns,
She wept and mourned the long toil of her breasts,
Groaning; and by her side their sister groaned:
"O ye who should have been my mother's stay
In age, O, thoughtless of my maiden years
Unwedded, dearest brothers!" From his chest
Heaving a heavy breath, King Eteocles heard
His mother, and stretched forth a cold damp hand
On hers, and nothing said, but with his eyes
Spake to her by his tears, showing kind thoughts
In symbols. Then the other, who still breathed,
Looked at his sister, and the queen, and said,
"We have perished, mother! yea, I pity thee,
And this my sister, and my brother dead;
For dear he was—my foe—and yet was dear.
Bury me, O my mother, and thou, too,
Sweet sister, in my father's land, I pray;
And close my dying eyelids with thy hand,
Mother!"—Upon his eyes he placed her hand—
"And fare you well! Now darkness clips me round."
Then both breathed out their weary life together.
But the queen, when she saw this direful end,
Maddened with anguish drew the dead man's sword,
And wrought things horrible; for through her throat
She thrust the blade; and on her dearest falling
Dies, and lies stretched, clasping both in her arms.

But to return to the virtue of εὐψυχία. The play of Hecuba contains a still more touching picture of heroism in death than that displayed by Menoikeus. Troy has been taken. Ulysses is sent by the Greeks to inform Hecuba that her daughter Polyxena must be sacrificed. Hecuba reminds him how in former days he had come disguised as a spy to Troy, and how she had recognized him, and, at his strong entreaty, spared him from discovery. In return for this, let him now spare her daughter. Frigidly and politely Ulysses replies, "True, lady, a life for a life. You saved mine, I would do something to save yours; but your daughter is quite another person. I have not the pleasure of having received benefits from her. I must trouble her to follow me." Then Polyxena breaks silence:

I see thee, how beneath thy robe, O king,
Thy hand is hidden, thy face turned from mine,
Lest I should touch thee by the beard and pray.
Fear not: thou hast escaped the god of prayers
For my part. I will rise and follow thee,
Driven by strong need; yea, and not loath to die.
Lo! if I should not seek death, I were found
A cowardly, life-loving, selfish soul!
For why should I live? Was my sire not king
Of all broad Phrygia? Thus my life began;
Then was I nurtured on fair bloom of hope
To be the bride of kings; no small the suit,
I ween, of lovers seeking me: thus I
Was once—ah, woe is me! of Idan dames
Mistress and queen, 'mid maidens like a star
Conspicuous, peer of gods, except for death;
And now I am a slave: this name alone
Makes me in love with death—so strange it is.

Sheer contempt of life, when life has to be accepted on dishonorable terms, is the virtue of Polyxena. But, so far, though we may admire her fortitude, we have not been touched by her misfortune. Euripides reserves the pathos, after his own fashion, for a picture. Talthybius, the herald, is telling Hecuba how her daughter died:

The whole vast concourse of the Achaian host
Stood round the tomb to see your daughter die.
Achilleus' son taking her by the hand,
Placed her upon the mound, and I stayed near;
And youths, the flower of Greece, a chosen few,
With hands to check thy heifer, should she bound,
Attended. From a cup of carven gold,
Raised full of wine, Achilleus' son poured forth
Libation to his sire, and bade me sound
Silence throughout the whole Achaian host.
I, standing there, cried in the midst these words:
"Silence, Achaians! let the host be still!
Hush hold your voices!" Breathless stayed the crowd;
But he: "O son of Peleus, father mine,
Take these libations pleasant to thy soul,
Draughts that allure the dead: come, drink the black
Pure maiden's blood wherewith the host and I
Sue thee: be kindly to us; loose our prows,
And let our barks go free; give safe return
Homeward from Troy to all, and happy voyage."
Such words he spake, and the crowd prayed assent.
Then from the scabbard, by its golden hilt,
He drew the sword, and to the chosen youths
Signalled that they should bring the maid; but she,
Knowing her hour was come, spake thus, and said:
"O men of Argus who have sacked my town,
Lo, of free will I die! let no man touch
My body: boldly will I stretch my throat.
Nay, but I pray you set me free, then slay;
That free I thus may perish: 'mong the dead,
Being a queen, I blush to be called slave."
The people shouted, and King Agamemnon
Bade the youths loose the maid, and set her free:
She, when she heard the order of the chiefs,
Seizing her mantle, from the shoulder down
To the soft centre of her snowy waist
Tore it, and showed her breasts and bosom fair
As in a statue. Bending then with knee
On earth, she spake a speech most piteous:
"See you this breast, oh! youth, if breast you will,
Strike it; take heart: or if beneath my neck,
Lo! here my throat is ready for your sword!"
He willing not, yet willing, pity-stirred
In sorrow for the maiden, with his blade
Severed the channels of her breath: blood flowed;
And she, though dying, still had thought to fall
In seemly wise hiding what eyes should see not.
But when she breathed her life out from the blow,
Then was the Argive host in divers way
Of service parted; for some bringing leaves,
Strewed them upon the corpse; some piled a pyre,
Dragging pine trunks and boughs; and he who bore none,
Heard from the bearers many a bitter word:
"Standest thou, villain? Hast thou then no robe,
No funeral honors for the maid to bring?
Wilt thou not go and get for her who died
Most nobly, bravest-souled, some gift?" Thus they
Spake of thy child in death: "O thou most blessed
Of women in thy daughter, most undone!"

The quality of εὐψυχία which we have seen in Menoikeus and Polyxena is displayed by Macaria in the Heracleidæ and by Iphigenia in the last scene of her tragedy at Aulis. Iphigenia in this play ranks justly as the most beautiful of Euripidean characters, and as the most truly feminine among the heroines of the Greek drama. Her first appearance on the stage enlists our sympathy, when she seems to welcome her father—the father whom we know to be ignobly and deceitfully planning her death—with the tenderest words of girlish greeting. Landor, in his celebrated dialogue between Agamemnon and his daughter, on the shores of Lethe, was mindful of this passage. But in that masterly study of Greek style he added a new element of pathos. Iphigenia has already drunk the waters of oblivion, and all the anguish of the past, her father's treachery, and the bending of his will in base compliance with a barbarous superstition, has been forgotten. Meanwhile Agamemnon has not only his daughter's wrongs upon his conscience, but Clytemnestra's adultery and vengeance, the price he paid for his old crime, are still hot in his memory. Therefore the situation is more complex in the modern poem. At Aulis, Iphigenia is but the loved child of a weak man, who has to return her pretty speeches and caresses with constrained phrases hiding a hideous meaning. When the truth is at last made known to her she pleads passionately for life. "Had I the tongue of Orpheus," she cries in her agony, "I would melt your heart to pity, father, with my words. But now my only eloquence is tears. I was the first who called you father, the first you called your child; the first who sat upon your knees and took and gave a daughter's kisses." She reminds him of his promises, the happy life she was to lead, the comfort she meant to bring to his old age. She asks what Helen and Paris have to do with her, or she with them, that she should perish in their quarrel. She makes the little Orestes kneel and clasp his hands in speechless prayer. At last the whole energy of her grief finds vent in words more thrilling even than Claudio's when he thinks of death: "Of all the joys that men can have, the sweetest is to live and see the light. The dead are nothing; only madmen pray for death; it is better to live miserably than to die gloriously." The effect of these passionate entreaties and of the lyrical outburst of anguish which follows is to make us feel the price of Iphigenia's sacrifice. She is no forlorn captive like Polyxena, but a princess in the very bloom and promise of her prime, affianced to Achilles, just entering upon the sweetness of new life divined "in rich foreshadowings of the world." How can she leave it all and go forth to dust and endless darkness? Yet her father has dropped one word which in her first passion of grief seems to be unheeded. "Hellas requires this of us both, my daughter—of you as far as in you lies, and of me also, in order that she should be free." When we next behold Iphigenia, his words had borne noble fruit. Clytemnestra and Achilles are devising how to save her. She enters, firm and resolute, but with the rapid utterance of exalted enthusiasm. Her determination has been taken. The duty laid upon her, the greatness of the glory, the grandeur of the part she has to play, had reconciled her to death. "Mother, listen to my words! The whole of mighty Hellas looks to me for her salvation and her freedom. How, then, should I be so life-loving as to shrink? And you, you did not bear me for yourself alone, but for all Greece. I give this my body for our land. Slay me; destroy the towers of Ilion. This shall be my everlasting monument, and this my children and my marriage and my fame." What follows in her dialogue with Clytemnestra and Achilles, Clytemnestra vainly seeking to overthrow her resolution, and Achilles blending his admiration of her heroism with regret that he should lose this flower of royalty, raises the unselfish passion of the girl to still sublimer height. She is not only firm, but exquisitely gentle. She thinks of her brother, whom she leaves behind. She entreats her mother to forgive Agamemnon. And even when she breaks into lamentation, her one sustaining thought remains, that she, she only, will overwhelm Troy, and bring the light of safety and of freedom upon Hellas. Here, then, in the εὐψυχία of Iphigenia, the antique thirst for glory is the determining motive; and her final resolution contradicts that first outcry of simple nature uttered to her father. The spiritual element, aflame with hope of everlasting honor, discards the cruder instincts that make men cling to life for life's sake only.

Another shade of the same virtue gives a peculiar attraction to the self-devotion of Alcestis in her death, and of Electra in her attendance on the brain-sick Orestes. Blending with the despair of the captive princess and the frenzy of the inspired Pythia, this sublime unselfishness renders Cassandra's attitude in the Troades heroically tragic. She goes, a bondwoman, an unwilling concubine, with Agamemnon to Mycenæ. Insult and slavery and a horrible death, clearly discerned by her prophetic vision, are before her. And yet she triumphs gloriously; her voice rings like a clarion when she proclaims that the guerdon of her suffering is the ruin of the house of Atreus. It is noticeable that Euripides, the so-called woman-hater, has alone of the Greek poets subsequent to Homer, with the single exception of Sophocles, devoted his genius to the delineation of female characters. It is impossible to weigh occasional sententious sarcasms against such careful studies of heroic virtue in woman as the Iphigenia, the Electra, the Polyxena, the Alcestis of our poet. Aristophanes, who was himself the worst enemy Athenian ladies ever met with, describes Euripides as a foe to women, apparently because he thought fit to treat them, not as automata, but as active, passionate, and powerful agents in the play of human life.[8]

But to return to our illustrations of εὐψυχία. In the Medea and the Hippolytus Euripides again displays this virtue of stern stoicism in two women. But here the heroines are guilty: their Spartan endurance of anguish to the death is tempered with crime. These tragedies are the masterpieces of the poet; in each of them the single passion of an individual forms the subject of the drama. Separated from all antecedents of ancestral doom, Medea and Phædra work out the dreadful consequences of their own tempestuous will. Not Othello, and not Faust, have a more complete internal unity of motive. No modern play has an equal external harmony of form. Medea was one of the most romantic figures of Greek story. Daughter of the sun-god in the Colchian land of mystery and magic, she unfolded like some poisonous flower, gorgeous to look upon, with flaunting petals and intoxicating scent, but deadly. Terrible indeed in wiles, she learned to love Jason. By a series of crimes, in which the hero participated as her accomplice, and of which he reaped the benefits—by the betrayal of her father's trust, by the murder of her brother, by the butchery of Pelias—she placed her lover on the throne of Thessaly. Then Jason, at the height of his prosperity, forgetting the love, as of some tigress, that the sorceress bore him, forgetting, too, her fatal power of life and death, cast his eyes on Glauke, the king's daughter of Corinth, and bade Medea go forth with her sons, a pariah—a dishonored wife. Whither should she turn? To Colchis, and the father whose son she slew? To Thessaly, where the friends of Pelias still live? Jason does not care. His passion for Medea has vanished like a mist. Their common trials common crimes—trials which should have endeared them to each other; crimes which were as strong as hell to bind them—have melted from his mind like dew. He only wishes to be rid of the fell woman, and to live a peaceful life with innocent home-keeping folk. But on one thing Jason has not reckoned—on the awful fury of his old love; he forgets how she wrought by magic and by poison in his need, and how in her own need she may do things terrible and strange. In the same way we often think that we will lightly leave some ancient, strong, habitual sin, of old time passionately cherished, of late grown burdensome; but not so easily may the new pure life be won. Between our souls and it there stands the fury of the past.

Medea in her house, like a lioness in her den, has crouched sleepless, without food, not to be touched or spoken to, since the first news of Glauke's projected bridal was told. No one knows what she is meditating. Only the nurse of her children mistrusts her fiery eyes and thunderous silence, her viperish loose hair and throbbing skin. The moment is finely prepared. Some Corinthian ladies visit her, and she, though loath to rise, does so at their prayer, excusing her reluctance by illness, and by a foreigner's want of familiarity with their customs. Pale, calm, and terrible, she stands before them. From this first appearance of Medea to the end of the play, her one figure occupies the whole space of the theatre. Her spirit is in the air, and the progress of the action only dilates the impression which she has produced. The altercations with Creon and with Jason are artfully conducted so as to arouse our sympathy and make us feel that such a nature is being driven by the intemperance and selfishness of others into a cul-de-sac of crime. The facility with which she disposes in thought of her chief foes, as if they were so many flies that have to be caught and killed, is eminently impressive. "Many are the ways of death: I will stretch three corpses in the palace—Creon's, the bride's, my husband's. My only thought is now of means—whether to burn them or to cut their throats—perchance the old tried way of poison were the best. They are dead." Καὶ δὴ τεθνᾶσι. Medea knows they cannot escape her. For the rest, she will consider her own plans. In the scene with Jason she rises to an appalling altitude. Her words are winged snakes and the breath of furnaces. There is no querulous recrimination, no impotence of anger; but her spirit glows and flickers dragon-like against him, as she stands above him on the pedestal of his ingratitude. But when he has gone, and she sits down to reconsider her last act of vengeance—the murder of his sons and hers—then begins the tragic agony of her own soul. These lines reveal the contest between a mother's love and the pride of an injured woman, the εὐψυχία of one who must steel her heart in order to preserve her fame for fortitude and power:

O Zeus, and justice of high Jove, and light
Of Sun, all seeing! Now victorious
Over my foes shall I pace forth, sweet friends,
To triumph!
I shudder at the deed that will be done
Hereafter: for my children I shall slay—
Mine; there is none shall snatch them from me now.
Let no one deem me timid, weak of hand,
Placidly tame; but of the other temper,
Harsh to my foes and kindly to my friends.

Then when Glauke, arrayed in the robe Medea sent her, is smouldering to ashes with her father in slow phosphorescent flame, Medea sends for her children and makes that last speech which is the very triumph of Euripidean rhetoric:

O children, children! you have still a city,
A home, where, lost to me and all my woe,
You will live out your lives without a mother!
But I—lo! I am for another land,
Leaving the joy of you:—to see you happy,
To deck your marriage-bed, to greet your bride,
To light your wedding-torch shall not be mine!
O me, thrice wretched in my own self-will!
In vain, then, dear my children! did I rear you;
In vain I travailed, and with wearing sorrow
Bore bitter anguish in the hour of childbirth!
Yea, of a sooth, I had great hope of you,
That you should cherish my old age, and deck
My corpse with loving hands, and make me blessed
'Mid women in my death. But now, ah me!
Hath perished that sweet dream. For long without you
I shall drag out a dreary doleful age.
And you shall never see your mother more
With your dear eyes: for all your life is changed.
Woe, woe!
Why gaze you at me with your eyes, my children?
Why smile your last sweet smile? Ah! me; ah! me!
What shall I do? My heart dissolves within me,
Friends, when I see the glad eyes of my sons!
I cannot. No: my will that was so steady,
Farewell to it. They too shall go with me:
Why should I wound their sire with what wounds them,
Heaping tenfold his woes on my own head?
No, no, I shall not. Perish my proud will.
Yet whence this weakness? Do I wish to reap
The scorn that springs from enemies unpunished?
Dare it I must. What craven fool am I,
To let soft thoughts flow trickling from my soul!
Go, boys, into the house: and he who may not
Be present at my solemn sacrifice—
Let him see to it. My hand shall not falter.
Ah! ah!
Nay, do not, O my heart! do not this thing!
Suffer them, O poor fool; yea, spare thy children!
There in thy exile they will gladden thee.
Not so: by all the plagues of nethermost hell
It shall not be that I, that I should suffer
My foes to triumph and insult my sons!
Die must they: this must be, and since it must,
I, I myself will slay them, I who bore them.
So it is fixed, and there is no escape.
Even as I speak, the crown is on her head,
The bride is dying in her robes, I know it.
But since this path most piteous I tread,
Sending them forth on paths more piteous far,
I will embrace my children. Oh, my sons,
Give, give your mother your dear hands to kiss!
Oh, dearest hands, and mouths most dear to me,
And forms and noble faces of my sons!
Be happy even there: what here was yours,
Your father robs you of. Oh, loved embrace!
Oh, tender touch and sweet breath of my boys!
Go, go, go, leave me! Lo, I cannot bear
To look on you: my woes have overwhelmed me!
Now know I all the ill I have to do:
But rage is stronger than my better mind,
Rage, cause of greatest crimes and griefs to mortals.[9]

Phædra, the heroine of the Hippolytus, supplies us with a new conception of the same thirst for εὐκλεία—the same εὐψυχία, γενναιότης, indifference to life when honor is at stake. The pride of her good name drives Phædra to a crime more detestable than Medea's, because her victim, Hippolytus, is eminently innocent. I do not want to dwell upon the pining sickness of Phædra, which Euripides has wrought with exquisitely painful details, but rather to call attention to Hippolytus. Side by side with the fever of Phædra is the pure fresh health of the hunter-hero. The scent of forest-glades, where he pursues the deer with Artemis, surrounds him; the sea-breeze from the sands, where he trains his horses, moves his curls. His piety is as untainted as his purity; it is the maiden-service of a maiden-saint. In his observance of the oath extorted from him by Phædra's nurse, in his obedience to his father's will, in his kindness to his servants, in his gentle endurance of a painful death, and in the joy with which he greets the virgin huntress when she comes to visit him, Euripides has firmly traced the ideal of a guileless, tranquil manhood. Hippolytus among the ancients was the Paladin of chastity, the Percival of their romance. Nor is any knight of mediæval legend more true and pure than he. Hippolytus first comes upon the stage with a garland of wild flowers for Artemis:

Lady, for thee this garland have I woven
Of wilding flowers plucked from an unshorn meadow,
Where neither shepherd dares to feed his flock,
Nor ever scythe hath swept, but through the mead
Unshorn in spring the bee pursues her labors,
And maiden modesty with running rills
Waters the garden. Sweet queen, take my crown
To deck thy golden hair: my hand is holy.
To me alone of men belongs this honor,
To be with thee and answer when thou speakest;
Yea, for I hear thy voice but do not see thee.
So may I end my life as I began.

Even in this bald translation some of the fresh morning feeling, as of cool fields and living waters, and pure companionship and a heart at peace, transpires. Throughout the play, in spite of the usual Euripidean blemishes of smart logic-chopping and pragmatical sententiousness, this impression is maintained. Hippolytus moves through it with the athletic charm that belongs to such statues as that of Meleager and his dog in the Vatican. At the end the young hero is carried from the sea-beach, mangled, and panting out his life amid intolerable pain and fever-thirst. His lamentations are loud and deep as he calls on Death the healer. Then suddenly is he aware of the presence of Artemis:

Oh, breath and perfume of the goddess! Lo,
I feel thee even in torment, and am eased!
Here in this place is Artemis the queen.

The scent of the forest coolness has been blown upon him. His death will now be calm.

A. Poor man! she is; the goddess thou most loved.

H. Seest thou me, lady, in what plight I lie?

A. I see thee; but I may not drop a tear.

H. Thou hast no huntsman and no servant now.

A. Nay, truly, since thou diest, dear my friend.

H. No groom, no guardian of thy sculptured shrine.

A. 'Twas Kupris, the arch-fiend, who wrought this woe.

H. Ah, me! Now know I what god made me die.

A. Shorn of her honor, vexed with thy chaste life.

H. Three of us her one spite—behold! hath slain.

A. Thy father, and his wife, and thirdly thee.

H. Yea, and I therefore mourn my sire's ill hap.

A. Snared was he by a goddess's deceit.

H. Oh! for your sorrow in this woe, my father!

T. Son! I have perished: life has now no joy.

H. I mourn this error more for you than me.

T. Would, son, I were a corpse instead of you.

A. Stay! for though earth and gloom encircle thee,
Not even thus the anger unavenged
Of Kupris shall devour at will thy body:
For I, with my own hand, to pay for thee,
Will pierce of men him whom she mostly dotes on,
With these inevitable shafts. But thou,
As guerdon for thine anguish, shalt henceforth
Gain highest honors in Trœzenian land,
My gift. Unwedded maids before their bridals
Shall shear their locks for thee, and thou forever
Shalt reap the harvest of unnumbered tears.
Yea, and for aye, with lyre and song the virgins
Shall keep thy memory; nor shall Phædra's love
For thee unnamed fall in oblivious silence.
But thou, O son of aged Ægeus, take
Thy child within thy arms and cherish him;
For without guile thou slewest him, and men,
When the gods lead, may well lapse into error.
Thee too I counsel; hate not thy own father,
Hippolytus: 'twas fate that ruined thee.

Thus Artemis reconciles father and son. Hippolytus dies slowly in the arms of Theseus, and the play ends. The appearance of the goddess, as a lady of transcendent power more than as a divine being—her vindictive hatred of Aphrodite, and the moral that she draws about the fate by which Hippolytus died and Theseus sinned, are all thoroughly Euripidean. Not so would Æschylus the theologian, or Sophocles the moralist, have dealt with the conclusion of the play. But neither would have drawn a more touching picture.

The following scene from the opening of the Orestes may be taken as a complete specimen of the manner of Euripides when working pathos to its highest pitch, and when desirous of introducing into mythic history the realities of common life. Electra appears as the devoted sister; Orestes as the invalid brother; the Chorus are somewhat importunate, but, at the same time, sympathetic visitors. This extract also serves to illustrate the Euripidean habit of mingling lyrical dialogue with the more regular Iambic in passages which do not exactly correspond to the Commos of the elder tragedians, but which require highly wrought expression. Helen has just left Electra. As the wife of Menelaus walks away, the daughter of Agamemnon follows her with her eyes, and speaks thus:

El. O nature! what a curse art thou 'mid men—
Yea, and a safeguard to the nobly-tempered!

[Points her finger at Helen.

See how she snipped the tips of her long hair,
Saving its beauty! She's the same woman still.—
May the gods hate thee for the ruin wrought
On me, on him, on Hellas! Woe is me!

[Sees the Chorus advancing.

Here come my friends again with lamentations,
To join their wails with mine: they'll drive him far
From placid slumber, and will waste mine eyes
With weeping when I see my brother mad.

[Speaking to the Chorus.

O dearest maidens, tread with feet of wool;
Come softly, make no rustling, raise no cry:
For though your kindness be right dear to me,
Yet to wake him will work me double mischief.

[The Chorus enters.

Ch. Softly, softly! let your tread
Fall upon the ground like snow!
Every sound be dumb and dead:
Breathe and speak in murmurs low!

El. Further from the couch, I pray you; further yet, and yet away!

Ch. Even so, dear maid, you see that I obey.

El. Ah, my friend, speak softly, slowly,
Like the sighing of a rush.

Ch. See I speak and answer lowly
With a stealthy smothered hush.

El. That is right: come hither now; come boldly forward to my side;
Come, and say what need hath brought you: for at length with watching tried,
Lo, he sleeps, and on the pillow spreads his limbs and tresses wide.

Ch. How is he? Dear lady, say:
Let us hear your tale, and know
Whether you have joy to-day,
Whether sorrow brings you low.

El. He is breathing still, but slightly groaning in his sleep alway.

Ch. O poor man! but tell us plainer what you say.

El. Hush! or you will scare the pleasant
Sleep that to his eyelid brings
Brief oblivion of the present.

Ch. Ah, thrice wretched race that springs
Burdened with the god-sent curses of abhorrèd deeds!

El. Ah, me:
Guilty was the voice of Phœbus, when enthroned for prophecy,
He decreed my mother's murder—mother murdered guiltily!

Ch. Look you, lady, on his bed,
How he gently stirs and sighs!

El. Woe is me! His sleep hath fled,
Frightened by your noisy cries!

Ch. Nay; I thought he sleeping lay.

El. Hence, I bid you, hence away
From the bedside, from the house!
Cease your noise;
Subdue your voice;
Stay not here to trouble us!

Ch. He is sleeping, and you rightly caution us.

El. Holy mother, mother Night!
Thou who sheddest sleep on every wearied wight!
Arise from Erebus, arise
With plumy pinions light:
Hover o'er the house of Atreus; and upon our aching eyes,
Wearied with woe,
With grief brought low,
Solace bring 'mid miseries.
Silence! Hush! what noise was this?
Can you ne'er your tongue restrain,
And allow soft slumber's kiss
To refresh his fevered brain?

Ch. Tell me, lady, what the close
Of his grief is like to be?

El. Death. Nought else will end his woes.
Lo, he fasts continually.

Ch. Alas! Alas! his fate is sure.

El. By the promise to make pure
Hands a mother's life-blood stained,
Phœbus brought
Woe, and wrought
All the grief that we have gained.

Ch. Just it was to slay the slayer; yet the deed with crime was fraught.

El. Thou art dead: oh, thou art dead,
Mother, who didst bear me! mother, who didst shed
A father's blood, and slay
The children of thy bed!
We are dying, we are dying, like the dead, and weak as they:
For thou art gone,
And I am wan,
Weeping, sighing night and day!
Look upon me, friends, behold
How my withered life must run,
Childless, homeless, sad and cold,
Comfortless beneath the sun.

Ch. Come hither, maid Electra, to the couch:
Lest haply he should breathe his life away
Unheeded: I like not this deep dead languor.

[Orestes wakes up.

Or. O soothing sleep! dear friend! best nurse of sickness!
How sweetly came you in my hour of need.
Blest Lethe of all woes, how wise you are,
How worthy of the prayers of wretched men!
Whence came I to this place? How journeyed I?
I cannot think: my former mind is vanished.

El. O dearest, how hath your sleep gladdened me!
Say, can I help to soothe or raise your body?

Or. Yes, take me, take me: with your kind hands wipe
The foam of fever from my lips and eyes.

El. Sweet is this service to me; I am glad
To soothe my brother with a sister's hand.

Or. Support me with your breast, and fan my forehead;
Brush the loose hair: I scarce can see for sickness.

El. Poor head! How rough and tangled are the curls,
How haggard is your face with long neglect!

Or. Now lay me back upon the bed again:
When the fit leaves me, I am weak and helpless.

El. Yea; and the couch is some relief in sickness,
A sorry friend, but one that must be borne with.

Or. Raise me once more upright, and turn my body:
Sick men are hard to please, through wayward weakness.

El. How would you like to put your feet to earth?
'Tis long since you stood up; and change is pleasant.

Or. True: for it gives a show of seeming health;
And shows are good, although there be no substance.

[Orestes changes his posture and sits at ease.

El. Now listen to me, dearest brother mine,
While the dread Furies leave you space to think.

Or. What have you new to say? Good news will cheer me;
But of what's bad I have enough already.

El. Menelaus is here, your father's brother:
His ships are safely moored in Nauplia.

Or. What! Has he come to end your woes and mine?
He is our kinsman and our father's debtor.

El. He has: and this is surety for my words—
Helen hath come with him from Troy, is here.

Or. If heaven had saved but him, he'd now be happier:
But with his wife, he brings a huge curse home.

El. Yea: Tyndareus begat a brood of daughters
Marked out for obloquy, a shame through Hellas.

Or. Be you, then, other than the bad; you can:
Make not fine speeches, but be rightly minded!

[As he speaks, he becomes excited.

El. Ah me, my brother! your eyes roll and tremble—
One moment sane, and now swift frenzy fires you!

[Orestes speaks to phantoms in the air.

Or. Mother, I sue to thee: nay, mother, hound not
Those blood-faced, snake-encircled women on me!
There! There! See there—close by they bound upon me!

El. Stay, wretched brother; start not from the bed!
For nought you see of what seems clear and certain.

Or. O Phœbus! They will slay me, those dog-faced,
Fierce-eyed, infernal ministers, dread goddesses!

El. I will not leave you! but with woven arms
Will stay you from the direful spasm-throes.

[Orestes hurls Electra, from him.

Or. Let go! Of my damned Furies thou art one,
That with thy grip wouldst hale me down to hell!

El. Ah, woe is me! what succor shall I find,
Seeing the very gods conspire against us?

Or. Give me my bow and arrows, Phœbus' gift,
Wherewith Apollo bade me fight the fiends,
If they should scare me with wild-eyed delirium.
Some god shall feel the fury of man's hand,
Unless ye vanish forth from out my sight!

[He threatens the phantoms.

Hear ye not! See ye not the feathery wings
Of swift, sure-striking shafts, ready to flutter?
Ha! Ha!
Why linger here? Go, sweep with outspread pinions
The windy sky! Hence, and complain of Phœbus!
Woe's me!

[Recovering his reason again.

Why waste I breath, wearying my lungs in vain?
Where am I? From my bed how leaped I—when?
'Midmost the waves once more I see fair weather.
Sister, why weep you? Wherefore veil your head?
I blush to see you partner of my woe,
Blush that a girl should suffer in my sickness.
Nay, do not pine thus, bowed beneath my burden—
All mine;—you said but yea, 'twas I who shed
Our mother's blood: but Loxias I blame,
Who urging me to most unholy deeds
Helped me with words, in act availed me nothing.
Yea, and I think my sire, if, face to face,
I asked him—is it right to slay my mother?
Would lengthen many prayers, beseeching me
Never to draw my sword on her who bare me,
Seeing he might not see the sun again,
And I am doomed to bear this weight of horrors.—
But now unveil your face again, dear sister,
And cease from weeping—even though we be
Ringed round with sorrows. When you see me downcast,
Soothe you my terror and my frenzied soul—
Soothe and caress me; yea, and when you moan,
'Tis mine to stay and comfort as I can:
For these kind services of friends are fair,
But, dear, sad sister, go into the house,
And give your watchful eyes to sleep, and rest;
Take food, and with fair water bathe yourself.
For think, if you should fail me, if by watching
You take some sickness, then we're lost: 'tis you,
You only, are my help; all else is vanished.

El. Not so. With you to die I choose, with you
To live: it is all one; for if you perish,
What shall I do—a woman? How shall I,
Brotherless, friendless, fatherless, alone,
Live on? Nay, if you ask it, I will do
Your will: but, brother, rest you on your bed;
Nor take the terror and the startling fear
For more than phantoms: stay upon the couch.
For though one is not sick, and only seems,
Yet is this pain and weariness to mortals.

This scene, for variety of motive and effect, is not excelled by any passage in ancient tragedy. The scope which it afforded for impressive acting must have been immense, though it is difficult to understand how the fixed masks and conventional dresses of the Greek stage could have been adapted to the violent and frequent changes of mood exhibited by Orestes. Adequately to render the effect of the lyrical dialogue between Electra and the Chorus is very difficult. I have attempted to maintain in some degree the antistrophic pauses, and by the use of rhyme to hint how very near the tragedy of the Greeks approached, in scenes like this, to the Italian opera. The entrance of the Chorus singing "Silence" can only be paralleled by passages in which the spies or conspirators of Rossini or Mozart appear upon the stage, whispering "Zitto! Zitto!" to the sound of subdued music. In the same way Electra's impassioned apostrophe to Night must have been the subject of an elaborate aria.

The scene which I have translated from the Orestes suggests the remark that many Euripidean plays were in fact melodramas. This is true, in a special sense, of the Troades, which must have owed its interest as an acted drama to the music and the mise en scène. It is also worthy of notice that a fair proportion of our extant tragedies are what the Germans call Lustspiele. That is to say, they have no proper tragic ending, and the element of tragedy contained in them consists of perils escaped by the chief actors. Thus the Helena and the Iphigenia in Tauris have a joyful climax. The Orestes closes with a reconciliation of all parties, hurriedly effected, that reminds us of a modern comedy. The Ion is brought to a satisfactory conclusion. The apotheosis of Iphigenia in her play at Aulis eliminates the tragic element, though, regarded as the first part of an eminently tragic series and read by the light of the Electra, this play may be regarded as the prologue to a mighty drama of crime and retribution. The Alcestis is now universally and rightly classed among the plays of a semi-satyric character; and the Andromache is not a genuine tragedy, since the death of Neoptolemus is episodical and has little to do with the previous action. In all these plays the key-note is struck by the Greek phrase μεταβόλη, which signified a revolution brought about within the limits of a certain situation. This probably attracted Euripides to the class of drama in question, since it enabled him to deal freely with character and to concentrate his attention upon the working out of striking incidents. From this point of view the Andromache is so important that it deserves more than a passing notice. The peculiar faculty and the prevailing faults of the poet are alike illustrated in its scenes—his fine and sharp character-making in the chief personages, his powerful rhetoric and subtle special-pleading, his acute remarks on politics and domestic relations, no less than his wilful neglect of dramatic unity and wanton carelessness of construction. Viewed in one light, the Andromache is a bitter satire upon the Spartan type of character, exemplified in the cruel Hermione and the treacherous Menelaus. From yet another standpoint of criticism it may be regarded as a dramatic essay on the choice of wives and the economy of the household. Thus the political and social theorist overlays the artist proper in this play; and yet the language is so brilliant, the pathos is so telling, and the lyrical episodes are so musical that we understand its popularity among the ancients. At the opening of the drama, Andromache, who has taken sanctuary at Phthia in the shrine of Thetis, describes the misery of her situation as bondwoman and concubine to Neoptolemus. Though warmly attached to herself and the father of her son Molossus, he has recently married Hermione, the Spartan princess. Thus the true subject of the play is set before us; for if the Andromache has any unity of conception, we must find it in the "nuptial choice" of Neoptolemus, who, after bringing discord into his household by the jealousy of two women, eventually meets his death as an indirect consequence of this domestic folly. The elegiac lamentations of the Trojan princess and the tender remonstrances of the Chorus, which follow the prologue, are among the most melodious passages of poetry in Euripides. Then the action begins. Neoptolemus is away at Delphi. Hermione and her father, Menelaus, remain at home, and use the opportunity for persecuting Andromache. In a long and agitating scene with Hermione, the heroine shows that she remains a noble lady, of untamed and royal soul, in spite of slavery. She disregards all threats, and maintains her station at the altar, whither she has fled for safety. One menace only makes her flinch. It is that violence may be done to her child Molossus, if she will not move. Now Menelaus enters, and the altercations are repeated, all tending to the same point of proving the odiousness of the Spartan character and the dignity of Andromache. Meanwhile our interest in her misfortunes is gradually heightened; and we tremble for her when at last Menelaus persuades her to leave the sanctuary by assuring her that the only way of saving Molossus is to sacrifice her own life. At this point the pathos of the situation becomes truly Euripidean. We have the spectacle of a tender and helpless mother in the power of a merciless tyrant, obliged to give her own life for her son, not shrinking from the sacrifice, but dreading to leave him unprotected to his future fate amid unkindly aliens. She rises from the altar; and no sooner is she in the hands of Menelaus, than he tells her that his promises were fraudulent. Molossus will be butchered after all. Then follows a great scene of high-wrought feeling. Andromache and Molossus are kneeling before Menelaus praying for their lives, when Peleus, the aged grandfather of Neoptolemus, appears and stays the execution. Euripides has drawn the character of Peleus with something of the heat and fury of the Sophoclean Teiresias. The old king does not spare Menelaus, but makes his tongue a scourge to flay him with invective. The end of the struggle is that Peleus conveys Andromache and the boy safely away; and during the rest of the drama we hear nothing of them. Meantime Hermione, who, in contrast to Andromache's noble firmness and womanhood, is the type of impotentia, as quick to self-abandonment as she was blind in selfish cruelty, begins to reflect upon her husband's anger. What will he say and do if he returns and hears of her intention with regard to Andromache? She is only just prevented from committing suicide, and lies sunk in contemptible remorse, when a new actor appears upon the scene. It is Orestes, to whom Hermione had been affianced at Argos. The treacherous Menelaus preferred to give her to a more fortunate and respectable husband; but Orestes has a mind to wed her still, and has resolved to murder Neoptolemus at Delphi because of the insult put upon himself. He therefore removes Hermione from the palace, and departs for Delphi. Peleus is now left alone upon the stage, to hear of the murder of his grandson from a messenger, and to receive instructions from Thetis as to the future of the realm of Phthia. It will be seen that the construction of this drama is defective, and that it has two separate plots, the one relating to Andromache, the other to Hermione and Orestes, which are only brought into artificial connection by the death of Neoptolemus. The speedy disappearance of Andromache from the scene, followed by the flight of Hermione and the escape of Menelaus to Sparta, leaves Peleus, who is only an accessory character, to bear the whole burden of the climax. Thus the Andromache lacks both internal and external unity, the unity of subject and form. Of material it has plenty, whether we regard the resolutions of fortune effected for the chief actors, or the variety of incidents, or the richness of reflective sentences, or the introduction of new "business" to sustain the flagging interest of the spectators. As a drama, it is second-rate. As a machine for the exhibition of specifically Euripidean qualities, it must rank high among the extant tragedies.

The Iphigenia in Aulide, the Electra, the Orestes, and the Iphigenia in Tauris might be called the Euripidean Oresteia, since each of these plays treats that portion of the Atridan story which Æschylus had handled in his three dramas. We miss the final purification of the hero, and have to infer the climax from the allusions of the Andromache, where, it may be said in passing, the noble type of his character, maintained without interruption in the Electra, the Orestes, and the Tauric Iphigenia, is deformed by a savagery and guile that must have been repellent even to a Greek audience. In the Electra Euripides comes immediately and without doubt consciously into competition with both Æschylus and Sophocles. Like Sophocles, he has painted Electra as of harder nature than her brother. When Orestes, before engaging in his mother's murder, shows signs of yielding to his filial feeling and expresses a doubt about the oracle, she, like Lady Macbeth, reanimates his wavering courage with argument and taunt. But Euripides seems to have felt that it was unnatural in the Sophoclean drama to represent both brother and sister as unterrified by conscience after the successful issue of their plot. The lyrical dialogue between Orestes and Electra, when he returns with their mother's blood upon his hands and sword, is both terribly true to nature and dramatically striking. It needs the appearance of the Dioscuri to confirm them in the faith that they had done a righteous, heaven-appointed deed of justice. By this touch Euripides proved his determination to bring even the most mysterious of legends within the pale of ordinary human experience. The situation in which he places Electra at the opening of the play, outcast from her father's palace and wedded to a farmer, ragged in attire and obliged to do the hard work of her household, is another and perhaps a less justifiable instance of his realism. The stirring of compassion by the exhibition of material misery was one of the points urged against him by Aristophanes; nor is it possible to feel that Electra's squalor adds anything essential to her tragedy. We may, however, be thankful to the poet for the democratic ideal of good manners and true chivalry, irrespective of blood and accidental breeding, which he has painted in his portrait of Electra's husband.[10] Not contented with thus varying the earlier outlines of the legend, Euripides in more than one passage directs a covert criticism against his predecessors. He shows that the tests of his identity offered by Orestes to Electra in the plays of Æschylus and Sophocles were insufficient, and that the murder of Clytemnestra in her palace, surrounded by the guard of a royal household, was improbable. The new motives invented by him for the recognition of Orestes and for the withdrawing of the queen to a place where she could be conveniently despatched are highly ingenious. Yet in the latter circumstance, what he gained in realism he lost in dramatic effect; for it was an incident of appalling terror that Clytemnestra and her paramour should be smitten in those very recesses of the palace where they had slaughtered Agamemnon, beneath the influence of those domestic Furies who, like an infernal revel, occupied the house of Atreus until all the guilty blood was shed. Throughout the Electra we feel that we are in the presence of a critical, realistic, and at the same time romantic, poet, who has embroidered the old material of heroic story with modern casuistry, and has been working less with a view to producing a masterpiece of art than with the object of asserting his ingenuity within the narrow field of an exhausted legend. Had we not the Choëphorœ and the Sophoclean Electra for standards of comparison, it is possible that we might do simpler justice to the creative power of "sad Electra's poet" in this drama. As it is, we can hardly refrain from treating it as a triumph of skill and reflective ability, rather than as a potent work of original genius.

The Orestes lies open to even more stringent criticism. The whole conclusion, consisting of the burning of the palace at Argos, the apotheosis of Helen, the lamentations of the Phrygian slave, and the betrothal of direst enemies above the ruins of their ancestral home, is more comic than tragic, and almost justifies the theory that Euripides intended it to be a parody of some contemporary drama. This portion of the play, moreover, is a melodrama, and joins on to the first part by a merely formal link. Such interest as the Orestes possesses, after the beautiful opening scene, centres in the heroic friendship of Pylades, who sustains the hero in his suffering and defends him from the angry folk of Argos. It is far otherwise with the Tauric Iphigenia. Here Euripides comes into no competition with Æschylus or Sophocles; for he has handled a legend outside the sphere of their known plays. It is one eminently suited to his powers, involving the description of romantic scenery, the recognition of brother by sister in circumstances of deep pathos and extreme improbability, the contest of the most powerful natural feelings, and in the last place, the exhibition of dangers impending upon all the chief personages and only avoided by a thoroughly Euripidean fraud. None of the plots invented by Euripides are so nicely finished or so rich in incident as this; and yet there is nothing mechanical in its construction. Few of his plays have choral passages to match the yearnings of the captive maidens for their home in Hellas or the praise of young Apollo throned by Zeus for prophecy beneath Parnassus. Few again are richer or more truthful in their presentation of emotions—the exquisite delicacy of a sister's affection, the loyalty of friends, and the passionate outpouring of a brother's love. Something in the savage circumstances of the play, the sombre Tauric scenery, the dreadful rites of Artemis, to whom Iphigenia has been bound, and the watchful jealousy of her barbarian king, enhances the beautiful humanity of those three Greeks, burdened with such weight of sorrow on a foreign shore, haunted by memories of a father's cruelty, a mother's infidelity, pursued by the Furies of a righteous but abominable deed, yet none the less enjoying for one moment in the midst of pain and peril the pure pleasures of companionship. The chorus of Hellenic captives maintains an undercurrent of sad music that still further helps to heighten and interpret the situation. It is only at the last, when the knot of the situation has to be cut, that our sympathy begins to fail us. Thoas, though a barbarian, had been generous and kind. Yet Iphigenia employs a heartless device for escaping from his hands with the sacred image of the Tauri in her possession; nor does she feel a moment's pang of remorse for the pain she is inflicting or for the lies she has employed to serve her purpose. It may indeed be said generally that Euripides justified the Aristophanic reproach of meanness by his too frequent employment of tricks and subterfuges. These are so distasteful to modern feeling that we are glad to know that even a Greek critic regarded them as faulty. With Iphigenia's treason against Thoas we might compare Helen's plot for deceiving Theoclymenus, the insidious attack of Orestes upon Neoptolemus at Delphi, the capture of Helen and Hermione by Orestes and Pylades at Argos, and Agamemnon's incredibly base lure to Clytemnestra and Iphigenia before Aulis. It is scarcely a defence of Euripides to urge that the gods themselves, as in the case of the Tauric Iphigenia, sanction these deceptions. This only makes the matter worse, and forces us to choose between two hypotheses—either that Euripides sought to bring the old religion into contempt, or that he used its morality for merely theatrical purposes to justify the romantic crimes of his heroes. The latter seems the more probable theory; for it is clear in some most eminent examples that he has treated a deeply immoral legend for the sake of its admirable artistic capabilities. This is undoubtedly the case with the Ion, which presents a marvellous tale of human suffering, adventure, crime, and final felicity, dependent in all its details upon the fraud of a deity. Without doing justice to the masterly construction of the plot, the beautiful poetry, and the sustained interest of the Ion, it may be allowed me here to dwell for one moment on its morality. Phœbus begets the boy Ion by a rape upon Creusa, and steals the boy away from Athens to Delphi. The mother is left to bewail not her shame only, but the loss of her son. In course of time she marries Xuthus and is childless. They go together to Delphi to inquire of the oracle; and here Xuthus is lyingly informed that Ion is the son of his youthful years. Rage and jealousy impel Creusa, on hearing this news, to poison Ion. She fails, and Ion in revenge attempts to murder her. The danger of Creusa at last forces Phœbus to reveal the truth through the mouth of Athene, who tells the queen that Ion is really her lost son, the offspring of Apollo's crime. Xuthus happens to be absent during this disclosure, and the goddess advises Creusa to keep the real truth to herself, since the good man already supposes Ion to be his own child, and will consequently treat him like a son. Stripped of its dramatic ornaments, its wonderful scene-painting, pathetic situations, unexpected recognitions, sudden catastrophes, accidents and dangers and adventures, this is the plain legend of the Ion; and a less ethical story of the gods could scarcely be found among those which Plato criticised in the Republic.

It is time to return from this digression once more to the plays which deal with Orestes. In them Euripides painted a virtue dear in its heroic aspect to the Greeks and celebrated in many of their legends, but which had not frequently been made the subject of dramatic presentation. The character of Pylades as the perfect comrade, fierce as a tiger and cunning as a fox against his foes, but tender as a woman to his suffering friend, willing to face all dangers in common with Orestes, enduring for his sake the obloquy of the world and the mysterious taint of religious impurity, refusing to live in his death and contending with him for the right to die, must be accepted as a masterpiece of creative power. There is nothing in common between Pylades and the confidant of modern tragedy—that alter ego or shadow of the hero's self, who dogs his path and reflects his sentiments. Pylades has a distinctly separate personality; in the Orestes, when Electra and her brother have abandoned hope, he takes the initiative and suggests the scheme that saves them. Yet none the less is sympathy the main point in his character. Euripides wrote nothing more touching than the description of his help afforded to Orestes in the council of the Argives, nothing more sublime than the contest between the two comrades in the Tauric Iphigenia, when it is a question which of them should stay and by his own death save his friend for Hellas. Had the Athenians thus always thought of friendship, or had they learned the enthusiasm of its ideal from Euripides, they might indeed have bequeathed a new chivalry to the world. The three tragedies in which Pylades plays a prominent part, the Electra, Orestes, and Tauric Iphigenia, are storehouses of the noblest sentiments and deepest truths about heroic friendship.

It is hard, while still beneath the overshadowing presence of so great a master as Euripides, to have patience with the critics and the scholars who scorn him—critics who cannot comprehend him, scholars who have not read him since they were at school. Decadence! is their cry. Yet what would they have? Would they ask for a second Sophocles, or a revived Æschylus? That being clearly impossible, beyond all scope of wish, why will they not be satisfied with beauty as luminous as that of a Greek statue or a Greek landscape, with feeling as profound as humanity itself, and with wisdom "musical as is Apollo's lute?" These are the qualities of a great poet, and we contend that Euripides possesses them in an eminent degree. It is false criticism, surely, to do as Schlegel, Müller, and Bunsen have successively done[11]—to measure Euripides by the standard of the success of his predecessors, or to ransack his plays for illustrations of pet dramatic theories, and then, because he will not bear these tests, to refuse to see his own distinguished merits. It would sometimes seem as if our nature were exhausted by its admiration of a Sophocles or a Shakespeare. There is no enthusiasm left for Euripides and Fletcher.

Euripides, after all is said, incontestably displays the quality of radiancy. On this I should be willing to base a portion of his claim to rank as a great poet. An admirer of Æschylus or Sophocles might affirm that neither Æschylus nor Sophocles chose to use their art for the display of thrilling splendor. However that may be, Euripides, alone of Greeks, with the exception of Aristophanes, entered the fairyland of dazzling fancy which Calderon and Shakespeare and Fletcher trod. The Bacchæ, like the Birds, proves what otherwise we might have hardly known, that there lacked not Greeks for whom the Tempest and A Midsummer-Night's Dream would have been intelligible. Meanwhile, in making any estimate of the merits of Euripides, it would be unfair to omit mention of the enthusiasm felt for him by contemporaries and posterity. Mr. Browning, in the beautiful monument which he has erected to the fame of Euripides, has chosen for poetical treatment the well-known story of Athenians rescued from captivity by recitation of the verses of their poet.[12] There is no reason to doubt a story which attests so strongly to the acceptation in which Euripides was held at large among the Greeks. Socrates, again, visited the theatre on the occasion of any representation of his favorite's plays. By the new comedians, Menander and Philemon, Euripides was regarded as a divine miracle. Tragedy and comedy, so dissimilar in their origins, had approximated to a coalition; tragedy losing its religious dignity, comedy quitting its obscene though splendid personalities; both meeting on the common ground of daily life. In the decadence of Greece it was not Æschylus and Aristophanes, but Euripides and Menander, who were learned and read and quoted. The colossal theosophemes of Æschylus called for profound reflection; the Titanic jokes of Aristophanes taxed the imagination to its utmost stretch. But Euripides "the human, with his droppings of warm tears," gently touched and soothed the heart. Menander with his facile wisdom flattered the intellect of worldly men. The sentences of both were quotable at large and fit for all occasions. They were not too great, too lofty, too profound for the paths of common life. We have lost Menander, alas! but we still possess Euripides. It seems a strange neglect of good gifts to shut our ears to his pathetic melodies and ringing eloquence—because, forsooth, Æschylus and Sophocles had the advantage of preceding him, and were superior artists in the bloom and heyday of the young world's prime.