Greek tragedy

by Gilbert Norwood

And gaze not on the couch of death.

It now remains for us to attempt a synthesis—to set before ourselves as clearly as may be the whole personality of Euripides. We are studying not the programme of a politician, but the spirit and method of a great artist, the inspiration of a great teacher. An artist has other things to heed than a superficial consistency of presentation; and a teacher of permanent value shows his followers not what to think, but how to think—not opinions, but the reasoned basis of opinion. Euripides is a man not of dogmas, nor indeed of negations; he is the apostle of a spirit which blows whither it lists, setting up a healthful circulation of tingling life throughout regions which have languished in the heavy air of convention. His work forces us to think and feel for ourselves, not necessarily to think and feel with him.

The briefest description of his special quality is that he is in the same moment a great artist and a great rationalist—a man profoundly conscious of the beauty and value of all life, all existence, all energy, and yet an uncompromising critic of the vesture which man throws around those parts of the Universe which are subjected to him. No man has ever loved and expressed beauty with a mind less swayed by illusion. These two instincts, the instinct to study life in all its unforced manifestations, and the instinct to question all conventions, lie at the root of his work. It is in virtue of these that he has been called enigmatic. Like Renan he was ἀνὴρ δίψυχος, a man of two souls[822]; but he is no more an enigma than others. His peculiarity lies herein, that the duality of nature often found in ordinary men was by him exhibited at the heights of genius. That is why he so often seems labouring to destroy the effect he has created; he is “inconsistent” because he is equally at home in the two worlds of feeling and of thought. Precisely for this reason he created a new type of drama. Horace Walpole wrote that “Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel”; thus, when a genius of Euripides’ type addressed itself to the theatre, the result was drama which could not but shock people who, bred in the school of Æschylus, had no conception of “tragedy” which could be witty, light, modern, destructive. Menander is the successor of Euripides, not of Aristophanes.

Anyone who follows out these two strands of instinct will understand much that might seem strange, much that gave offence, in his work. It will be well therefore to bring together the faults which have been found with him in ancient and in later times. Leaving on one side, since it is by no means certainly a reproach, the celebrated remark[823] of Sophocles, “I represent people as they should be, Euripides as they are,” we find our chief material in Aristophanes and Aristotle. The Frogs contains an elaborate attack upon the tragedian which, whether fair or not, has a prima facie reasonableness. Euripides is twitted with moral and literary offences. In the first place, his predilection for depicting the power of love, especially the adulterous or incestuous passions of women[824] and the sophistical restlessness of mind which he inculcates,[825] mark him as a corrupter of Athens. On the technical side, his music[826] is affected and decadent, the libretto[827] of his choruses is both elaborate and jejune, the style of his iambics[828] lacks weight and dignity, his prologues[829] are tiresome and written in a mechanical fashion. Aristotle in his turn objects to certain weaknesses of characterization: Menelaus in the Orestes is particularly bad, the speech of Melanippe—no doubt that celebrated oration on miracles—is indecorous and out of character; in the Aulid Iphigenia the heroine is inconsistent.[830] He gives two examples[831] of the irrational, Ægeus in the Medea and Menelaus once more in the Orestes. Euripides’ use of the deus ex machina is also often bad; he instances Medea’s miraculous chariot. Lastly there is the famous mixture[832] of praise and blame: “Euripides, faulty as he is in the general management of his subject, is yet felt to be the most tragic of the poets.” If we pass now to modern detractors, we find one fault overshadowing all the rest—bad construction, what Aristotle calls “episodic” plots, namely, plays the several scenes of which are more or less accidentally combined and form no organic whole.

There is truth in some of this fault-finding; whether we are to regard such features as actually blemishes is another matter. Two certainly are defects of the gravest possible description—“episodic” plots and the deus ex machina. If a man produces plays which have no organic unity, or which at the close of the action are in such a tangle that a being of superhuman information and power is necessary to “cut the knot,” he is no “unskilful dramatist” but merely a blockhead, for he can always fling his rubbish into the fire. So hopelessly damaging are these two accusations that one really cannot believe Euripides obnoxious to them. One might as well allege that Alexander did not understand tactics, or that Pericles believed Byzantium was in Sicily. The charge of faulty construction has been considered earlier in connexion with the plays which are supposed examples thereof. But the deus ex machina needs a few words. “The god out of the machine” is a phrase of two applications. It may mean a deity brought in to round off the play by giving information about the future history of the personages. Or the god may be introduced when the plot, owing to the human limitations of the characters, has become knotted and progress is impossible; then a being who miraculously knows all the facts appears and “cuts” the knot. In the first case the epiphany is practically outside the drama; in the second it is only too vital to it. Of the first case there are five[833] instances in the extant plays: to these, of course, our grave objection cannot apply. Of the second type there are seven[834] examples if we regard the miraculous car of Medea as a “deus”. Granted the story which is known to the audience, such interventions are necessary. Medea cannot escape the vengeance of Corinth, Orestes the verdict of the Argive State, without supernatural aid; Theseus would, it might seem, never have been persuaded by mortal witness that Hippolytus is innocent; in the Tauric Iphigenia and the Helena[835] nothing but a miracle can save from death the fugitives who as a matter of “history” reached home in safety: the Supplices would end without the formal compact between rescuers and rescued if the goddess did not intervene; as for the Ion, Euripides’ contemporaries knew that Delphi still flourished, so that the annihilating investigation of Ion must, it appeared, have been somehow arrested. For these seven plays, then, we can choose between two theories of the deus ex machina (in that second sense of a pseudo-dramatic expedient). The first theory is that the poet wishes to end with “historical” truth, but in the course of his action has so blundered that he cannot naturally do so; therefore he puts forward a god who asserts that the action shall continue as “history” asserts that it did; so might a competitor in a match of archery employ a confederate who, whenever his arrow missed the target, should pick it up and plant it in the white. The other theory is that Euripides intended to work out an interesting situation of legend as a study in natural psychology and social development. The situation according to story came to a certain end; according to Euripides that was not the natural end. And he emphasizes this legendary distortion by pointing out clearly that to square nature and the story nothing less than a miracle is required. To assert that he needed the supernatural intervention to save his play is absolutely to reverse the facts. Can we doubt which of these theories is sound?

Two further questions at once arise. Why did he select situations from misleading legends? And, is there then no pseudo-dramatic deus ex machina at all? The first question is of vital importance. It is incorrect to say that he was bound by convention to the traditional stories; Phrynichus, Agathon, and Moschion all defied this “convention”. Euripides was a student of human thought, of the development of belief, as well as a dramatist. Convinced that his contemporaries held false beliefs about the gods and that the myths were largely responsible for this, hypnotizing thought by their beauty and paralyzing logic by their authority, he sets himself to show, not only that they are untrue, but also how, though untrue, they ever won credence. As for the deus ex machina the truth is that he does not exist (save, of course, in the rôle of a non-dramatic narrator). He is, like the three unities, a figment based on uncritical and hasty reading. Outside this poet the only possible case is that of the Philoctetes, which has been shown no genuine instance.

We may now return to the objections raised by Aristophanes and Aristotle. They are all due to the two instincts we have described—his interest in every manifestation of life, and his stern rationalism. Most of the technical flaws, for instance, alleged against him are proofs that he was attracted by the possibilities of his own art; he is constantly testing the limits to which development can go. The iambics of the Orestes, for example, are extraordinarily full of resolved feet; after that play he restrains himself more. In music too he appears to have been an explorer; at any rate the fault found with the words of his choruses points to a development like the modern, in which libretto was becoming subservient to music. The comic poet, again, fastens eagerly upon the prologues, and puts into the mouth of Æschylus a famous jest:—[836]

Æsch.: And now, by Jove, I’ll not smash each phrase word by word, but with heaven’s aid I’ll ruin your prologues with—a little oil-flask.

Eur.: An oil-flask? You ... my prologues?