and thus," she continues, "we cling to this strange thing that shines in the sunlight, and are sick with love for it, because we have not seen beyond the veil." A stirring thought this, and much nearer to the heart of mysticism than any mere assertion of human immortality. Thus it is not from any position like what we should call "dogmatic atheism" or "scientific materialism" that the child of the Sophists started his attacks on the current mythology. The Sophists themselves had no orthodoxy.
Euripides was always a rejecter of the Laws of the Herd. He was in protest against its moral standards, its superstitions and follies, its social injustices; in protest also against its worldliness and its indifference to those things which, both as a poet and a philosopher, he felt to be highest. And such he remained throughout his life. But in his later years the direction of his protest did, I think, somewhat change. In the Athens of Melos and the Sicilian expedition there was something that roused his aversion far more than did the mere ignorance of a stupid Greek farmer. It was a deeper "amathia," a more unteachable brutality. The men who spoke in the Melian Dialogue were full of what they considered "Sophia." It is likely enough that they conformed carefully to the popular religious prejudices—such politicians always do: but in practice they thought as little of "the gods" as the most pronounced sceptic could wish. They had quite rejected such unprofitable ideals as "pity and charm of words and the generosity of strength," to which the simple man of the old times had always had the door of his heart open. They were haunters of the market-place, mockers at all simplicity, close pursuers of gain and revenge; rejecters, the poet might feel in his bitterness, both of beauty and of God. And the Herd, as represented by Athens, followed them. Like other ideal democrats he turned away from the actual Demos, which surrounded him and howled him down, to a Demos of his imagination, pure and uncorrupted, in which the heart of the natural man should speak. His later plays break out more than once into praises of the unspoiled countryman, neither rich nor poor, who works with his own arm and whose home is "the solemn mountain" not the city streets (cf. especially Orestes, 917-922, as contrasted with 903 ff.; also the Peasant in the Electra; also Bac., 717). In the Bacchae we have not only several denunciations—not at all relevant to the main plot—of those whom the world calls "wise"; we have the wonderful chorus about the fawn escaped from the hunters, rejoicing in the green and lonely places where no pursuing voice is heard and the "little things of the woodland" live unseen. (866 ff.) That is the poetry of this emotion. The prose of it comes in a sudden cry:
The simple nameless herd of humanity Have deeds and faith that are truth enough for me;
though even that prose has followed immediately on the more mystical doctrine that man must love the Day and the Night, and that Dionysus has poured the mystic Wine that is Himself for all things that live (421-431, 284). In another passage, which I translate literally, he seems to make his exact position more clear: "As for Knowledge, I bear her no grudge; I take joy in the pursuit of her. But the other things" (i.e., the other elements of existence) "are great and shining. Oh, for Life to flow towards that which is beautiful, till man through both light and darkness should be at peace and reverent, and, casting from him Laws that are outside Justice, give glory to the gods!"[2]
Those "Laws which are outside Justice" would make trouble enough between Euripides and the "simple herd" if ever they reached the point of discussing them. He who most loves the ideal Natural Man seldom agrees with the majority of his neighbours. But for the meantime the poet is wrapped up in another war, in which he and religion and nature and the life of the simple man seem to be standing on one side against a universal enemy.
I am not attempting to expound the whole meaning of the Bacchae. I am only suggesting a clue by which to follow it. Like a live thing it seems to move and show new faces every time that, with imagination fully working, one reads the play. There were many factors at work, doubtless, to produce the Bacchae: the peculiar state of Athens, the poet's ecstasy of escape from an intolerable atmosphere, the simple Homeric life in Macedonian forests and mountains, and perhaps even the sight of real Bacchantes dancing there. But it may be that the chief factor is simply this. When a man is fairly confronted with death and is consciously doing his last work in the world, the chances are that, if his brain is clear and unterrified, the deepest part of his nature will assert itself. Euripides was both a reasoner and a poet. The two sides of his nature sometimes clashed and sometimes blended. But ever since the Heracles he had known which service he really lived for; and in his last work it is the poet who speaks, and reveals, so far as such a thing can be revealed, the secret religion of poetry.
[2] In my verse translation I took a slightly different reading, being then misinformed about the MS., but the general sense is the same. ("Knowledge, we are not foes," etc.)