Euripides and His Age

by Gilbert Murray

THE ART OF EURIPIDES: IDEAL FORM AND SINCERE SPIRIT: PROLOGUE: MESSENGER: "DEUS EX MÂCHINÂ"

Euripides was so much besides a poet that we sometimes tend to regard him exclusively as a great thinker or a great personality and forget that it is in his poetry that he lives. A biography like that which we have attempted to sketch is of little value except as a kind of clue to guide a reader through the paths of the poet's own work. It is only by reading his plays that we can know him; and unfortunately, owing to the two thousand odd years that have passed since his death, we must needs approach them through some distorting medium. We read them either in a foreign language, as a rule most imperfectly understood, or else in a translation. It is hard to say by which method a reader who is not a quite good Greek scholar will miss most. A further difficulty occurs about the translations. I need not perhaps apologize for assuming normally in the present volume the use of my own. There has been lately, since the work of Verrall in England and Wilamowitz in Germany, a far more successful effort made to understand the mind of Euripides, while the recent performances of his plays in London and elsewhere have considerably increased our insight into his stagecraft. Consequently we can now see that the older translations, even when verbally defensible and even skilful, are often seriously inadequate or misleading. A comparison of Dr. Verrall's English version of the Ion with practically any of its predecessors will illustrate this point.

The greatest change that has come over our study of Greek civilization and literature in the last two generations is this: that we now try to approach it historically, as a thing that moves and grows and has its place in the whole life-history of man. The old view, sometimes called classicist, was to regard the great classical books as eternal models; their style was simply the right style, and all the variations observable in modern literature were, in one degree or another, so many concessions to the weakness of human nature. There is in this view an element of truth. The fundamental ideals which have produced results so singularly and so permanently successful cannot be lightly disregarded. Books that are still read with delight after two thousand years are certainly, in some sense, models to imitate. But the great flaw in the classicist view, as regards the ancient literature itself, was that it concentrated attention on the external and accidental; on the mannerism, not the meaning; on the temporary fashion of a great age, not on the spirit which made that age great. A historical mind will always try, by active and critical use of the imagination, to see the Greek poet or philosopher in his real surroundings and against his proper background. Seen thus he will appear, not as a stationary "ancient" contrasted with a "modern," but as a moving and striving figure, a daring pioneer in the advance of the human spirit, fore-doomed to failure because his aims were so far greater than his material resources, his habit of mind so far in advance of the world that surrounded him. We seem in ancient Greece to be moving in a region that is next door to savagery, and in the midst of it to have speech with men whom we might gladly accept as our leaders or advisers if they lived now.

Meantime there are screens between us and these men; the screens of a foreign language, a strange form of life, different conventions in art. It is these last that we must now deal with, for we shall find it hard ever to understand Greek tragedy if we expect from it exactly what we expect from a modern or Elizabethan play.

One would have to make no such preface if we were dealing with the form of Greek Drama that immediately succeeded the great age of Tragedy. There arose in the fourth century, b.c., a kind of play that we could understand at once, the so-called New Comedy of Menander and Philemon. New Comedy is neither tragic nor comic, but, like our own plays, a discreet mixture of both. It has no austere religious atmosphere. Its interest—like ours—is in love and adventure and intrigue. It has turned aside from legend and legendary Kings and Queens, and operates, as we do, with a boldly invented plot and fictitious characters, drawn mostly from everyday life. The New Comedy dominated the later Attic stage and called into life the Roman. It was highly praised and immensely popular. It was so easy in its flow and it demanded so little effort. Yet, significantly enough, it has passed away without leaving a single complete specimen of its work in existence. When after ages were exerting themselves to save from antiquity just that minimum of most precious things that must not be allowed to die, it was the greater and more difficult form of drama that they preserved.

Let us try to see and to surmount the difficulties. Every form of art has its conventions. Think, for instance, of the conventions of modern Opera. Looked at in cold blood, from outside the illusion, few forms of art could be more absurd, yet, I suppose, the emotional and artistic effect of a great opera is extraordinarily high. The analogy may help us in the understanding of Greek tragedy.

Let us remember that it is at heart a religious ritual. We shall then understand—so far as it is necessary for a modern reader to think of such things—the ceremonial dress, the religious masks, the constant presence or nearness of the supernatural. We shall understand, perhaps, also the formal dignity of language and action. It is verse and, like all Greek verse, unrhymed; but it is not at all like the loose go-as-you-please Elizabethan verse, which fluctuates from scene to scene and makes up for its lack of strict form by extreme verbal ornamentation. In Greek tragic dialogue the metrical form is stiff and clear; hardly ever could a tragic line by any mistake be taken for prose; the only normal variation is not towards prose but towards a still more highly wrought musical lyric. Yet inside the stiff metrical form the language is clear, simple and direct. A similar effect can, in my opinion, only be attained in English by the use of rhyme. You must somehow feel always that you are in the realm of verse, yet your language must always be simple. In blank verse the language has to be tortured a little, or it will read like prose.

Now all this sounds highly conventional; that it is. And artificial and unreal? That it is not. We are apt at the present moment of taste to associate together two things that have no real connexion with one another—sincerity of thought and sloppiness of form. Take on the one hand dramatic poems like Swinburne's Locrine, written all in rhymed verse and partly in sonnets, or George Meredith's Modern Love, which is all in a form of sonnet. These are works of the most highly-wrought artistic convention; their form is both severe and elaborate; in that lies half their beauty. But the other half lies in their sincerity and delicacy of thought and their intensity of feeling. They are sincere but not formless. Of the other extreme, which is formless without being sincere, I need give no examples. The reader can think of the worst-written novel he knows and it will probably satisfy the conditions. In Greek tragedy we have the element of formal convention extremely strong; we have also great subtlety and sincerity.

This quality of sincerity is, perhaps, the very first thing that should be pointed out to a reader who is beginning Greek tragedy. Coming in the midst of so much poetical convention it takes a modern reader by surprise; he expected romantic idealism and he finds clear character-drawing. I once read a critic who argued that Euripides had low ideals of womanhood because, in the critic's carefully pondered judgment, Medea was not a perfect wife. Even Coleridge complained that the Greek tragedians could not make a heroine interesting without "un-sexing her." Such criticisms imply a conception of drama in which the women are conventionally seen through a roseate mist of amatory emotion. We mean to be in love with the heroine, and in order that she may be worthy of that honour the author must endow her with all the adorable attributes. The men in such plays suffer much less from beautification, but even they suffer. This spurious kind of romanticism implies chiefly an indifference to truth in the realm of character; it is generally accompanied by an indifference to truth in other respects. It leads stage-writers to look out for the effect, not the truth; to write with a view to exciting the audience instead of expressing something which they have to express. It leads in fact to all the forms of staginess. Now from Greek tragedy this kind of falseness is almost entirely absent. "It has no utter villains, no insipidly angelic heroines. Even its tyrants generally have some touch of human nature about them; they have at least a case to state. Even its virgin martyrs are not waxen images." The stories are no doubt often miraculous; the characters themselves are often in their origin supernatural. But their psychology is severely true. It is not the psychology of melodrama, specially contrived to lead up to "situations." It is that of observed human nature, and human nature not merely observed but approached with a serious almost reverent sympathy and an unlimited desire to understand. Mr. Bernard Shaw, in his Quintessence of Ibsenism (1913), writes of a new element brought into modern drama by the Norwegian school. "Ibsen was grim enough in all conscience; no man has said more terrible things; and yet there is not one of Ibsen's characters who is not, in the old phrase, the temple of the Holy Ghost, and who does not move you at moments by the sense of that mystery." Allowing for the great difference of treatment and the comparative absence of detail in the ancient drama, this phrase would, I think, be true of all the great Greek tragedians. In Euripides it is clear enough. Jason, as well as Medea, Clytemnestra as well as Electra, even satirized characters like Menelaus in the Trojan Women or Agamemnon in the Iphigenîa in Aulis, are creatures of one blood with ourselves; they are beings who must be understood, who cannot be thrust beyond the pale; and they all "move us at moments by the sense of that mystery." But it holds in general for the other tragedians too, for the creators of Creon and Antigone, of Prometheus and Zeus. "What poet until quite modern times would have dared to make an audience sympathize with Clytemnestra, the blood-stained adulteress, as Aeschylus does? Who would have dared, like Sophocles, to make Antigone speak cruelly to her devoted sister, or Electra, with all our sympathies concentrated upon her, behave like a wild beast and be disgusted with herself for so doing? (Soph. Elec. 616 ff.)."

But what we have now to realize is that this sincerity of treatment takes place inside a shell of stiff and elaborate convention.