“And she told me that the lady was a daughter of Zeus! What! is there some person called Zeus living beside the Nile? There’s one in Heaven, to be sure, but that’s another story.” Such a translation gives perhaps the intention of the words and colloquial rhythm of the last sentence. Here is comedy, but that of Congreve, not of Aristophanes. The distinction is important. Euripides is less comic than witty. As we turn his pages we rarely laugh, but a thousand times we break into the slight smile of intellectual enjoyment; one delight in reading an Euripidean play—tragedy though it be—is the same as that aroused by the work of Meredith. Euripides’ sense of the ludicrous is a part of his restlessness in conception. Again and again he startles us by placing at some tragic moment a little episode which passes the pathetic and becomes absurd. When Clytæmnestra and Achilles bring each other into awkward perplexity over the espousal of Iphigenia the effect is amusing, and the intervention of the old slave who puts his head out of the tent-door must provoke a smile, even though we realize that he has misery and death on his lips.[847] After Creusa has given her instructions for the assassination of Ion, it is, though natural, yet quaint for the prospective murderer to reply: “Now do you retire to your hotel”.[848] In the Medea the whole episode of Ægeus, to which Aristotle objected as “irrational,” is tinged with the grotesque. That the horrible story of Medea’s revenge must hang upon a slow-witted amiable person like Ægeus is natural to the topsy-turviness of life as the dramatist saw it. In fact, just as Euripides on the linguistic side practically invents the prose-drama, so in the strictly dramatic sphere he invents tragicomedy. Nothing can induce him to keep tears and laughter altogether apart. The world is not made like that, and he studies facts, depicting the phases of great happenings not as they “ought to be” but “as they are”. He would have read with amused delight that quaint sentence of Dostoevsky: “All these choruses sing about something very indefinite, for the most part about somebody’s curse, but with a tinge of the higher humour”.[849] It is indeed significant that sparkles of incidental mirth are (so far as a modern student can tell) commonest in that most heartbreaking play Orestes. One dialogue between Orestes and Menelaus, to take a single passage, is a blaze of wit—it exemplifies every possible grade of witticism, from the downright pun[850] to subtle varieties of iambic rhythm. Perhaps the most light-hearted and entertaining example[851] is provided by Helen who (of all casuists!) evolves a theory of sin as a method of putting her tigerish niece into good humour and so inducing her to perform for Helen an awkward task. Even more skilful, but ghastly in its half-farcical horror, is the dialogue between Orestes and the escaped Phrygian slave.
Later ages of Greek civilization looked upon Euripides as a mighty leader of thought, a great voice expressing all the wisdom of their fathers, all the pains and perplexities familiar to themselves. After generations had passed it was easy to dwell upon one side only of his genius, and for Plutarch or Stobæus to regard him as the poet of sad wisdom:—
Amongst us one,
Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedly
His seat upon the intellectual throne;
And all his store of sad experience he
Lays bare of wretched days![852]
But his own contemporaries, living in the days before Ægospotami and knowing the many facets of his spirit, could not so well accept a man of such contradictions, who was in strange earnest about things they felt to be indifferent, and who smiled at such odd moments. Euripides must often have felt himself very lonely in Athens. “My soul,” he cries, “lay not hold upon words of subtlety. Why admit these strange high thoughts, if thou hast no peers for audience to thy serious musings?”[853] And again;—
Though far beyond my ken a wise man dwell,
Across the earth I greet him for a friend.[854]