Chapter V · THE WORKS OF EURIPIDES (continued 3)

Some ancient critics denied that Euripides wrote the Rhesus, and the great majority of modern scholars have accepted this view.[778] The evidence for Euripidean authorship is as follows: (i) The play comes down to us in the manuscripts of that poet. (ii) That Euripides wrote a Rhesus is known from the Didascaliæ or Dramatic Records. (iii) Early Alexandrian writers quote passages from our text as from “the Rhesus of Euripides”. On the other side are (i) a statement in the Argument:[779] “Some have suspected this drama to be spurious, and not the work of Euripides, for it reveals rather the Sophoclean manner”; (ii) various features of the work which modern critics have regarded as suggesting an inferior playwright: (a) the plot is superficial; (b) there is no prologue;[780] (c) four actors are needed; (d) Æneas and Paris have practically nothing to do; (e) the chorus is employed in a manner foreign to Euripidean plays; (f) there is a lack of force and pathos; (g) there is no rhetoric; (h) there is no sententiousness; (i) we have here the beginning of historical drama, which is later than the fifth century; (j) the style is eclectic: imitations of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are to be observed.[781]

Several of these objections are plainly unfounded. Four actors are not clearly necessary, as was shown above. Pathos, of a kind quite Euripidean, is to be found in the scene where the Muse laments her glorious son. And how deny rhetorical force to a poet who can write such brilliantly vigorous things as:—

The high-hearted defence[783] of Rhesus is full of the same tingling rhetoric. Yet many critics[784] of the highest rank have denied Euripidean authorship to the Rhesus. On the other side stands[785] the testimony of the almost contemporary record. One consideration, obvious yet too often ignored, may help us. The earliest work of Euripides to which we can assign a date—the Alcestis—belongs to the year 438. The poet was then at least forty-two years old. Is it beyond belief that twenty years before the Alcestis the youthful dramatist composed a stirring tale of war and hair-breadth escape, which owed much to the manner of Æschylus, especially in his handling of the chorus? During the period for which we have evidence, he was constantly testing the possibilities of his art. Need we assume that until the Alcestis he had not advanced?

The soundest view appears to be that we have here a very early work of Euripides. This is confirmed by the critic Crates, an Academic philosopher of the second century before Christ, who asserted that Euripides was still young when he wrote the Rhesus.[786] To this should be added whatever help may be drawn from contemporary history. It is natural to suppose that when this drama was composed Athenian politics were closely concerned with Thrace. An Athenian colony at Nine Ways, afterwards called Amphipolis, was destroyed by the Thracians in 465 B.C. In 436 the place was resettled under the new name by Hagnon, who brought the bones of Rhesus from the Troad back to Thrace. The later year, as connected with the hero, would seem the more suitable, were it not for the words[787] of his mother who refuses burial for her son and proclaims his strange life after death: “hidden in caverns of the silver-yielding soil he shall lie as a human spirit, still living”. Such language would rather be avoided after the bones themselves had been visibly committed to Thracian earth. On the whole, one thinks the situation more suitable to some period, anterior to Hagnon’s expedition, when Thracian politics were in the air, perhaps quite soon after the disaster of 465 B.C.[788]

Of the lost plays we have about eleven hundred fragments. Few of these comprise more than three or four lines, but a fair conception of several dramas can be formed from reports of the plot, parodies by Aristophanes, and the remains themselves.

The Telephus was acted in 438 B.C., together with The Cretan Women, Alcmæon at Psophis, and Alcestis. Sophocles won the first prize, Euripides the second. Telephus, King of Mysia, was wounded by Achilles when the Greeks invaded Mysia in mistake for Troy. His wound would not heal, and he entered his enemies’ country disguised as a beggar, to consult the Delphic oracle, which declared that “the wounder would heal him”. Meanwhile the Greek heroes were deliberating at Argos about a second expedition. Agamemnon refused to set forth again, and uttered to Menelaus the celebrated words: Σπάρτην ἔλαχες· ταύτην κόσμει—“Sparta is thy place: make thereof the best”. While the council was in progress Telephus begged audience. His disguise was penetrated by Odysseus, and he was about to be slain when he snatched up the infant Orestes, threatening to kill the child if the Greeks molested him. He was given a hearing and justified his action in fighting the Greeks when they invaded his country. His hearers were won over, but it was found that Achilles had no knowledge of medicine. Odysseus suggested that the real “wounder” was Achilles’ spear. Telephus was thus healed, and in his gratitude consented to guide the Greeks to Troy.

We possess in the Acharnians of Aristophanes an elaborate and brilliant parody of the interview granted to Telephus. Dicæopolis, an Athenian farmer who has made peace on his own account with Sparta, is attacked by his fellow-citizens, the charcoal-burners of Acharnæ, and only obtains leave to plead his cause by threatening to slay their darling—a coal-basket. Then he begs from Euripides the beggar’s outfit of Telephus, and, returning, delivers a clever harangue denouncing the war. The baby-hostage idea Aristophanes used again in the Thesmophoriazusæ, where Mnesilochus, in great danger from the infuriated women, seizes the infant which one of them is carrying, only to find it a concealed wine-skin.

Philoctetes was produced in 431 B.C. with the Medea, Dictys, and Harvesters (Θερισταί), when both Euripides and Sophocles were defeated by Euphorion, the son of Æschylus. Our knowledge is derived almost wholly from Dio Chrysostom[789] who compares the three plays called Philoctetes by Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. He offers interesting comments on the differences in plot. In Euripides, as in Æschylus, the chorus consists of Lemnian men, but the later poet anticipates criticism by making his chorus apologize for not visiting the sufferer earlier. One Lemnian, by name Actor, takes part as a friend of Philoctetes. The “prologue” is spoken by Odysseus (here working with Diomedes, not Neoptolemus, as in Sophocles) who explains that he would not have undertaken this present task for fear of being recognized by Philoctetes, had not Athena changed his appearance. (Here, as in the apology offered by the chorus, we have implied criticism[790] on Æschylus.) The Trojans are sending an embassy in the hope of gaining Philoctetes. Later in the drama, no doubt, occurred a set dispute between the Greek and the Trojan envoys.

In the Bellerophon Euripides seems to have gone to the extreme in depicting the passionate atheism inspired by the sight of prosperous wickedness. “If the gods do aught base,” he exclaims in a famous line, “they are not gods.” Another vigorous fragment begins:—

Bellerophon ascended to Heaven on his winged steed Pegasus in order to remonstrate with Zeus. This idea is used farcically in Aristophanes’ Peace, where Trygæus ascends on a monstrous beetle.

Erechtheus was a beautiful picture of patriotism. Athens being attacked by the Eleusinians and Thracians, King Erechtheus was told by the Delphic oracle that he could secure victory for Athens by sacrificing his daughter. His wife Praxithea, in a speech of passionate patriotism, consented to give up her child; Swinburne has used this fragment in his own Erechtheus. Another long fragment contains the advice which Erechtheus gives to his son, and which in its dry precision curiously resembles the farewell of Polonius to Laertes. While the issue of battle remains uncertain, the chorus of old Athenians sing a lyric which charmingly renders their yearning for peace:

Another popular play was the Antiope. It dealt with the persecution of Antiope by Lycus, King of Thebes, and his wife Dirce. She was rescued from death by her two sons, Amphion and Zethus, whom she had been compelled to abandon at birth, and who discovered the relationship in the critical hour. The chief interest of the play was the contrast between the brothers—Zethus a man of muscle, devoted to farming; Amphion, a musician and lover of the arts. Euripides developed this contrast in a long debate wherein culture was upheld against the “Philistine”. We still read one criticism of myth which recalls a blunt passage of the Ion.[791] Story said that Antiope’s sons were the offspring of Zeus, but Amphion has the hardihood to express doubt to his mother herself.

With the Helen (B.C. 412) was produced a work of the first importance—the Andromeda, a charming love-story full of romance and poetical loveliness. It was immensely popular; Aristophanes gives in his Thesmophoriazusæ a parody as elaborate as that of Telephus in the Acharnians, and it was a perusal of this drama which excited Dionysus in the Frogs to descend to Hades for the purpose of fetching back the dead playwright. Lucian[792] tells how Archelaus, the tragic actor, came to Abdera and performed the Andromeda. The whole town grew crazy over it. “They used to sing the solo from the Andromeda and recite Perseus’ speech from beginning to end. The town swarmed with these actors of a week’s standing, pale and lean, shouting with all the strength of their lungs

and all the rest of it. This went on for a long time, in fact till winter, when a severe frost cured them of their nonsense.” The Andromeda points forward to the novel, and it is interesting to note that in the best Greek novel—the Æthiopica of Heliodorus, who wrote about eight hundred years after Euripides’ death—the heroine’s father, like Andromeda’s, was an Æthiopian king.

Scanty as are the remnants of this drama, we can still form some idea of its structure.[793] “It is the crowning virtue of all great art that, however little is left of it by the injuries of time, that little will be lovely.”[794] The country of Cepheus, the Ethiope king, was ravaged by a sea-monster, and the only help lay in sacrificing to the creature Andromeda, the king’s daughter, who was bound to a rock and left as his prey. At this point the action begins. It is still night and from the cliff rises the lament of the captive:—

At each pause in her song comes the voice of Echo repeating the sad syllables, till Andromeda is joined by the maidens who form the chorus. The lyric dialogue concluded, it seems[795] that the father and mother, Cepheus and Cassiopeia, enter and that there is some talk of attacking the monster; Phineus, brother of the king and the affianced of Andromeda, shrinks from the risk. But now comes unlooked-for aid. Perseus, fresh from his slaughter of the Gorgon, arrives, borne through the air on his winged sandals. Though Zeus is his father, in this play he figures as the lowly hero familiar in our own fairy-tales. Certainly he appears to be contrasted with the rich but cowardly Phineus, and the helpless despairing king. His first words have been preserved:—

Drawing near, he perceives that this thing of beauty is a living maiden, and at once longs to make her his bride. When she asks his name, instead of proudly claiming Zeus as his father, he mentions his own name, his journey’s end, and his achievement:—

But he is no mediæval knight; he does not forbear to state his claim before addressing himself to the task: “And if I save thee, maid, wilt give me thanks?” Andromeda, on her side, feels and speaks without subtlety:—

and again

Before encountering the monster Perseus comes to an understanding with Cepheus and goes forth to the conflict, calling upon Eros to aid his chosen:—

Two or three lines picture the grateful crowd of rustics who surrounded the victor: “all the shepherd-folk flowed around him, one bringing an ivy-bowl of milk for his refreshing, another the joyous grape-juice”. Phineus sought to assert his claim upon Andromeda, but was repulsed by her father. Later the maiden’s parents themselves begged her not to leave them desolate. In a thrilling[796] reply she declared that she would cleave to her husband. Then follows mention of a wedding-feast, and at the close it seems probable that Athena foretold the future.

Of the Phaethon we are fortunate in possessing two unusually long fragments of seventy and seventy-five lines respectively. It is an exciting and romantic story—the legend of Phaethon, child of the Sun-god, who called upon his father to prove their relationship by permitting him for one day to drive the chariot of the Sun. This conception, gorgeous with the spirit of adventure and an un-Greek yearning for what transcends mortal power, seems to have filled the whole play with glow and rushing movement. A fragment of the prologue marks this at once: it tells how Clymene is wedded

From Strabo,[797] to whom we owe this extract, we learn that the palace of Merops is close to the abode of the Sun-god. This notion that the youth’s home is only an hour’s walk from the palace of the Sun, gives a sense of delightful verisimilitude.[798] It appears that Phaethon in this prologue tells how his father Merops plans to marry him to a goddess, but that he himself is unwilling.[799] Clymene, his mother, to persuade her son that he will not be distastefully united to one vastly his superior, reveals that he is the son not of Merops but of the Sun-god, Helios, who promised her long ago that he would grant her child one wish. Let Phaethon approach Helios with some request, and prove her story. The prince resolves to do so. The chorus of female attendants enter with a lovely song in honour of Phaethon’s wedding; they picture the whole earth awakening to daily activities. Next appears the king, who describes the brilliant future which awaits his son.[800] Phaethon views with distaste this life of easeful splendour; to him at this moment may well be attributed the vigorous words[801]

Goethe has indicated, with splendid insight, the dramatic power which must have filled this scene: the aged king offering the easy joys of riches and a royal home to this youth already burning in secret for the high enterprise of seeking his real and divine father.

Later the interview was described between Phaethon and Helios, who after seeking to dissuade him, granted his request and added anxious instructions:—

The messenger seems to have continued with a picture of Phaethon’s fall. The body, still giving off the smoke of destruction, is next brought in, and we possess part of Clymene’s frantic speech. Her grief is mingled with terror: the strange manner of her son’s death may provoke her husband Merops to inquiry and reflexion and so her long-past union with the Sun-god may come to light. She bids them hide the body in the treasure-chamber, of which she alone holds the keys. Soon the king enters amid lyric strains celebrating the marriage-day of Phaethon. He is giving orders for merry-making when a servant hurries out to inform him that the treasure-chamber is giving forth clouds of smoke. Merops hastens within, and the chorus bewail the disclosure which is imminent. In a moment the stricken father is heard returning with lamentation. The course of the last scene is not certain, but probably a god reconciled the king and his wife, giving directions for the disposal of Phaethon’s body; a beautiful but obscure fragment,[802] redolent with the charm of breezes and murmuring boughs after all this blaze and splendour, seems to point to the story of Phaethon’s sisters, who mourned him beside the western waters and were transformed into poplars. This god was probably Oceanus,[803] the father of Clymene. He alone (deity of the world-encircling water) could give unity to these two pictures, the radiant eastern land of Phaethon’s youthful enterprise, and the distant western river where his sorrows and his end are bathed in dim beauty.

This sketch allows us to realize how much we have lost in the Phaethon. The romantic events and setting recall the Andromeda. Clymene’s sorrow and shame mingle strangely with the gallant enterprise and bright charm of the whole, somewhat as Creusa’s story is contrasted with the fresh cheerfulness of Ion. Above all, the noble simplicity and high-hearted adventurousness of Phaethon, inspired by his new-found kinship with a god and chafing at the placid programme of domestic honour and luxury which his supposed father sets before him—this is a concept of boundless promise.

The Hypsipyle,[804] which was produced late[805] in Euripides’ life, is specially interesting through the discovery in 1906 of extensive fragments at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Previously it was known by scanty quotations of no great interest, though apparently much prized in ancient times.[806] The plot is now in the main clear. Hypsipyle, grand-daughter of the god Dionysus and daughter of Thoas, King of Lemnos, was exiled because she refused to join in the massacre of the Lemnian men by their women. Previously she had borne twin sons to Jason. These she lost when expelled from her home. She is now slave to Eurydice, Queen of Nemea in the north of the Peloponnese, and nurse to her infant son Opheltes. Her own sons come in quest of her, and without recognizing their mother are entertained in the palace. Hypsipyle is quieting the child with a song and a rattle when the chorus of Nemean women enter. Next certain soldiers arrive from the host which the seven chieftains are leading against Thebes. Their commander, the prince Amphiaraus, explains that the army is in need of water, and Hypsipyle consents to show them a spring. Later she returns in anguish: during her absence the child has been killed by a great serpent. Eurydice is about to slay her, when she appeals to Amphiaraus, who pleads her cause and promises Eurydice that the Greeks shall found a festival in honour of the child. (This festival is that of the famous Nemean Games.) He sees that this fatal accident is a bad omen for the enterprise of the Seven, and names the child Archemorus[807] instead of Opheltes. Eurydice is appeased. Later we find Hypsipyle and her sons made known to one another, and the god Dionysus appears, apparently to arrange future events.

Though there is one difficulty as to the plot, namely, that we do not know what function was assigned to Hypsipyle’s sons—they cannot have been introduced merely for the recognition-scene—the whole conception strikes one as simple and masterly. It has been well remarked[808] that while a modern dramatist would have omitted the Theban expedition, “nothing seemed to the Greeks worthy of contemplation in the theatre by a great people, unless it had some connexion with the exploits and the history of nations.... On the same canvas the death of one little child and the doom of the seven chieftains with their crowding battalions are depicted in a perspective which sets the former fatality in the foreground.”

The captive princess, even through the ruins of the text, shines forth with great charm. Her whole life centres round her lost children and the brief magical time of her union with Jason. The chorus reproach her with her indifference to the exciting presence of Adrastus’ great army—she will think of nothing save Argo and the Fleece. When at point to die her spirit flashes back to those old days in a few words of amazing poignancy:—

“Ah, prow of Argo and the brine that flashed into whiteness! ah, my two sons!” Her talk with them towards the end is a pathetic and lovely passage equal to anything Euripides ever wrote in this kind.

Melanippe the Wise[809] appears to have been a drama of unusual personal interest. Æolus espoused Hippe, whose daughter Melanippe became by Poseidon mother of twin sons. The god bade her hide them from Æolus, and they were discovered by grooms in the care of a bull and a cow. They, supposing the children miraculous offspring of these animals, reported their discovery to Æolus, who decided to expiate the portent by burning the infants alive. Melanippe was instructed to shroud them for death. In order to save her children without revealing her own secret she denied the possibility of such portentous births, but seems to have found herself forced at length to confess in order to prove the natural origin of the infants. Æolus condemned her to be blinded and imprisoned, her offspring to be exposed. Her mother Hippe appeared as dea ex machina[810] and saved her kin.

The great feature of this play was the heroine’s speech in which she sought to convince her father that such a portent was impossible. Lines from the opening of this argument are preserved: “The story is not mine—from my mother have I learned how Heaven and earth were once mingled in substance; when they separated into twain they engendered and brought into the light of day all creatures, the trees, birds, beasts, nurslings of the sea, and the race of men”. The speech was an elaborate scientific sermon to disprove the possibility of miracles. Similarly, according to a famous story, the drama opened originally with the line: “Zeus, whoever Zeus may be, for only by stories do I know of him ...”; but this open agnosticism gave such offence that Euripides produced the play again with the words: “Zeus, as Truth relates....” A different but closely-connected source of interest is the fact that here Euripides veiled his own personality less thinly than usual. That Melanippe was only his mouthpiece appears to have been a recognized fact. Dionysius of Halicarnassus[811] observes that it presents a double character, that of the poet, and that of Melanippe; and Lucian[812] selects the remark on Zeus in the prologue as a case where the poet is speaking his own views. The “mother” from whom “Melanippe” learned her philosophy has been identified with the great metaphysician and scientist Anaxagoras, who was banished from Athens in 430 B.C.; and it is natural to suppose that this Melanippe is not much later than that year, perhaps much earlier[813] in view of the strongly didactic manner.[814] Hartung refers to this play the splendid fragment:—

“Happy is he who hath won deep learning. He setteth himself neither to hurt his fellow-citizens nor towards works of iniquity, but fixeth his gaze upon the ageless order of immortal Nature, the laws and methods of its creation. Unto such a man never doth there cling the plotting of base deeds.” If these lines point at Anaxagoras and belong to our play, the two significant clauses which defend the moral character of the philosopher in question indicate the year 430 itself.

The Cresphontes had immense success as a powerful melodrama. Polyphontes, having slain his brother Cresphontes, King of Messenia, seized his throne and married his widow Merope, who sent her infant son Cresphontes away to safe keeping in Ætolia. When he grew up he returned to avenge his father. At this point the action begins. Cresphontes seems to have delivered the prologue; since Polyphontes fearing his return has offered a reward to whoever shall slay him, he has determined to win the usurper’s confidence by claiming to have destroyed his enemy. Meanwhile, Merope, alarmed by the proclamation of the king, has sent an aged slave to find whether Cresphontes is well; he returns with tidings that the prince has disappeared from Ætolia. Merope gives her son over for lost, and observing the youthful stranger who is received with joy by the king, she becomes convinced that he is the murderer of her son. While he lies asleep she steals upon him with an axe, when the old slave recognizes the stranger and stops her arm. Mother and son are united, and at once plot to slay Polyphontes. Merope pretends to be reconciled to the king, who in his joy goes to sacrifice, accompanied by the youth, who takes advantage of a suitable moment to slay his enemy.

Plutarch, nearly six centuries later, testifies[815] to the sensation which the Recognition caused in the audience. Merope herself seems to have been a figure ranking with Hecuba in the Troades. The tidings of her son’s death draw from her words which in their quiet dignity of grief have something of Wordsworth:—

Probably it was Merope again who uttered the famous lines which advise lament over the newly-born and a glad procession to accompany the dead. The recognition-scene is singled out for especial praise by Aristotle.[816]

The fragments of this tragedy include a perfect jewel of lyric poetry, a prayer to Peace:—

A paraphrase might run thus:—

O Peace, thou givest plenty as from a deep spring: there is no beauty like unto thine, no, not even among the blessed gods.

My heart yearneth within me, for thou tarriest; I grow old and thou returnest not.

Shall weariness overcome mine eyes before they see thy bloom and thy comeliness? When the lovely songs of the dancers are heard again, and the thronging feet of them that wear garlands, shall grey hairs and sorrow have destroyed me utterly?

Return, thou Holy One, to our city: abide not far from us, thou that quenchest wrath.

Strife and bitterness shall depart, if thou art with us: madness and the edge of the sword shall flee away from our doors.

Matthew Arnold’s Merope has the same plot and includes a recognition-scene which probably resembles the lost original closely. His conception of Polyphontes is thoroughly Euripidean.

Of the other lost plays little can be said here. Still amid this faint glow of star-dust many marvellous things are to be discerned—words of tremulous tenderness from the Danae describing the charm of infancy; a line from Ino which in its powerful grimness recalls Æschylus, “like a lone beast, he lurks in caves unlit”;[817] out of the Polyidus the celebrated query,

From an unknown drama comes a line which owes its preservation to St. Paul[819]:

“evil communications corrupt good manners”. Euripides’ cosmopolitan sympathy nowhere finds finer expression than in the distich

But the student must at his leisure explore the marvels of these rock-pools left by the retiring ocean. One majestic passage[821] from the Cretans shall suffice to close this survey. The lines are from a march sung by the Curetes or priests of the Cretan Zeus, and show that even in the Hellenic world the monastic spirit was not unknown:—

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?

Æsch.: Just one little flask. You write so that anything will fit into your iambics—a little fleece, a little flask, a little bag. I’ll show you on the spot.

Eur.: Oh! you will?

Æsch.: Yes.

Dion.: Now you must recite something.

Eur.:

Æsch.: (interrupting) ... “lost his flask of oil”.

Several other absurd instances follow.

This celebrated jest means (i) that Euripides constructs the early sentences of his prologue in such a way that a subordinate clause (usually containing a participle) leads up to a short main clause at the end of the sentence; (ii) that his prologues descend to trivial details; (iii) that the cæsura occurs always in the third foot; (iv) that he is viciously addicted to resolved feet. The tragedian can be defended from these charges, such as they are, but the idea at the back of Aristophanes’ mind is true, namely, that these prologues are often dull performances. Probably the poet did not intend much more. He wishes to put his hearers au fait with the precise legend and the precise point with which he is concerned;[837] as is often said, these passages take the place of a modern play-bill.

Later in the Frogs Dionysus produces a huge pair of scales; each is to utter a line into his scale-pan, and the heavier line wins. Euripides declaims into his pan the opening line of the Medea, εἴθ’ ὤφελ’ Ἀργοῦς μὴ διαπτάσθαι σκάφος, and his rival Σπερχειὲ ποταμὲ βουνομοί τ’ ἐπιστροφαί. Dionysus absurdly explains that the latter wins because he has put in water like a fraudulent woollen-merchant, while Euripides has offered a “word with wings”. Underlying this nonsense is the truth that the Æschylean line is ponderous and slow, that of Euripides light and rapid; it is like contrasting Marlowe and Fletcher. The difference is not between good and bad, but between old and new. Æschylus’ iambic style is fitted most admirably for his purpose. But Euripides has not the same purpose—that is all. It is one of his most remarkable innovations that he practically invented the prose-drama. A very great deal of his “verse” is simply prose which can be scanned. To compare such a passage[838] as:

or a hundred others, with the beacon-speech in Agamemnon or Athena’s charge to the Areopagite court, is to ignore the whole point of a literary revolution. Who would set a page of Hedda Gabler’s conversation against an extract from Macbeth, and affirm that Ibsen could not write dialogue?

Ibsen, indeed, it is particularly instructive to bear in mind here. According to him “the golden rule is that there is no golden rule”.[839] Dr. Stockman’s nobility consists in telling the truth at all costs. Gregers Werle insists on that course, and is seen to be a meddlesome prig who ruins his friend’s home. Here the Greek and the Norwegian agree heartily; for the “sophistry” with which many at Athens were disgusted is only Euripides’ way of putting his conviction that there is no fixed rule of conduct, still less any fixed rule for our self-satisfied attempts to praise or blame the abnormal. An impulse of pity ruins Creon in the Medea; Lycus in the Heracles turns his back on mercy, and is destroyed also. The pride of glorious birth nerves Macaria to heroism; of Achilles it makes merely a pathetic sham. Consciousness of sin wrecks and tortures Phædra, while to Helen in Orestes it means little more than a picturesque melancholy. Hermione in Andromache and Creusa both go to all lengths in their passionate yearning for domestic happiness; one destroys her husband and her own future, the other reaps deeper bliss than she dared to hope. Iphigenia and Hippolytus serve the same goddess, but amid what different atmospheres and diverse destinies! This consciousness that effort brings about results different from its aims, that chance, whatever chance may be, is too potent to allow any faith in orthodox deities, only in moods of despair wrings from the poet such outcry as Hecuba’s, that Fate is “a capering idiot”.[840] But it has planted surely in his mind the conviction that there is no golden rule of conduct. And hence that “love of forensic rhetoric” of which we hear so much—each case must be considered on its own merits.

To this agnosticism we owe not only that treatment of religious legend which we have already studied but the poet’s greatest achievement. Socrates, because, as he said, he could not understand metaphysics or astronomy, gave his attention to man. His friend because he despaired of a satisfying theology threw his genius into psychological drama. The centre of his interest is the human heart. Only one fact about destiny can be stated as consistently held by him, namely, that the spring of action and the chief factor in happiness or misery is, not the will of Heaven or dogmatic belief, but the nature (φύσις) of the individual.[841] Because he studies sin, not to condemn but to understand, he has earned that reproach of Aristophanes who rages at his predilection for Phædras and Sthenebœas. What attracted him was not a desire to gloat or even to pardon; it was the fact that the sinners he depicts are so intensely alive. A being dead in virtue engaged his interest less than one who, however evilly, existed with vigour. To this passionate interest in human life can be referred as basis all the other themes on which he spent study. Religion, as we have found, only attracts him because it guides or misleads conduct. His political studies have little concern with ethnology or economics; they are only an expansion to a wider field of this same interest in sheer humanity. Philosophy and natural science are of value for him, as for Lucretius, in that they provide an escape from paralyzing superstition. If they are presented as a refuge from the facts of life, he will have none of them. When Electra[842] seeks in her knowledge of astronomy a far-fetched consolation for self-fostered misery, she strikes us not as heroic but as own kin to the febrile “intellectuals” of Tchekov’s Cherry Orchard or the novels of Dostoevsky.

His dislike of convention in morals is answered by his originality in portraiture as well as in dramatic situations. Nothing is more thrilling than to observe how in the hands of a great realist whole masses of human beings come to life. What was the background of one novelist suddenly begins in the pages of another to stir, to articulate itself, to move forward and discover a language. “The men” commanded by Captain Osborne in Vanity Fair become Private Ortheris or Corporal Mulvaney in the pages of Kipling. So in Euripides the dim and familiar background of “barbarians” who existed merely to give colour and outline to Achilles and Odysseus, the women who bore the necessary children and ground the needed flour, the henchmen without whom horses would not be groomed or trees felled, suddenly awake and reveal passions of love and hatred, pathetic histories, opinions about marriage and the grave. In every age the man who points to the disregarded, the dormant, hitherto supposed securely neutral and plastic, who cries “it is alive, watching you and reflecting, waiting its time”—such a man is met in his degree with the reception given to Euripides by the elder generation of Athenians. The clamour of “crank!” “faddist!” “this is the thin end of the wedge,” and kindred watchwords, may be found translated into brilliant Attic by Aristophanes. But in virtue of these same interests Euripides became the Bible of later Greek civilization. He would have passed into a fetish had it not been that the destructively critical side of his genius prevented the most narrow-minded from reducing him to a system. To the last he remains inconclusive, provocative, refreshing.

On the other side his sensitiveness to all aspects of life—his “feeling for Beauty” to use the familiar phrase—held him back from mere cynicism. The Hippolytus remains as perhaps the most glorious support in literature for unflinching facing of facts—it shows triumphantly how a man may feel all the sorrow and waste which wreck happiness, yet declare the endless value and loveliness of life. We may detect two aspects in which this joy in life shows itself most markedly—his romance and his wit.

Romance is not improperly contrasted with “classicism,” but as few Greek or Roman writers are classical in the rigid sense it is not surprising to find romantic features outcropping at every period of their literature. Euripides himself is the most romantic author between Homer and Appuleius, whatever our definition of romance may be. R. L. Stevenson’s remark that “romance is consciousness of background,” Hegel’s doctrine that “romantic art is the straining of art to go beyond itself,”[843] and a more recent dictum that “romance is only the passion which is in the face of all realism,”[844] each of them definitely recalls some feature of Euripides’ work already discussed. A modern writer with whom he can be fruitfully compared, at this point especially, is Mr Bernard Shaw. In many characteristics these two dramatists are notably alike: their ruthless insistence upon questioning all established reputations, whether of individuals, nations, or institutions; their conviction that there is no absolute standard of conduct; their blazing zeal for justice; their mastery of brilliant lithe idiom. But in their feeling about romance they diverge violently. Perhaps the largest ingredient in Mr. Shaw’s strength is his hatred and distrust of emotion and of that spirit, called romance, which organizes emotion and sees in it a basic part of life. But Euripides appreciates it all the more highly that he is not enslaved by it. Even in such ruthless dramas as the Medea and the Iphigenia in Tauris one remarks how the thrill and beauty of life gleams out, if only as a bitter memory or a present pain of contrast—the magic fire-breathing bulls and the heapy coils of the glaring dragon in the remote land where Jason won his quest, the strange seas, deserted beaches, and grim savages among whom Iphigenia cherishes her thoughts of childhood in Argos. The same sense of glamour which inspires early in his life such a marvellous flash as the description of Rhesus’ steeds:

and indeed the whole dashing buoyant drama—this passion survives the shames and disillusionment wrought by twenty-five years of tyranny and war; it persists even in those black but glorious hours when he wrote the Troades and at the close of his life culminates in the splendours of the Bacchæ. No attentive student of his work can ignore this effect, but if we possessed all his plays we should be in no danger of accepting the idea that Euripides is beyond all other things a bitter realist. The Andromeda and the Phaethon would have redressed the balance.

The wit of Euripides cannot easily be discussed; it often depends upon idiomatic subtlety, and must almost disappear in translation. But frequently, again, it consists in the method of handling a situation. Just as the playwright often makes of his drama, among other things, an elaborate reductio ad absurdum of myth, so is he capable of writing a whole scene with a twinkle in his eye. The clearest example is the Helena; Menelaus’ stupefaction at learning that Egypt contains an Helen, daughter of Zeus, is indeed definite comedy:

“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:—

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;—

It may be that Europeans of our own day are better fitted to estimate him aright than enthusiasts under the Empire or his companions who saw him too close at hand. During the last half-century we have witnessed great changes which have their counterpart in the Athens for which he wrote. Hopes have been realized only to prove disappointments and the source of fresh perplexities. In England the spread of knowledge has resulted not in a cultivated, but in a mentally restless people. Universal ability to read has for its most obvious fruit not wider knowledge of literature, but more newspapers and a rank jungle of “popular” writing. Similarly at Athens the sophists had produced mental avidity where there was no quickening of spiritual vigour to correspond. Another fact of vital import has been the rise of our working-class to solidarity and political power: it probably resembles that “demos” which Cleon led more closely than “the masses” with which Peel or Russell had to deal. Again, experience of war has shown how small is the effect which settled government, social reform, and education have exercised upon the raw, primitive, human instincts, both base and noble. In Greece, the empire of Athens, with its tyranny and selfishness, and the Peloponnesian war which had produced a frightful corruption of conduct and ideals,[855] tainted society with that cynicism (ἀναίδεια) of which Euripides so often speaks. Just as we are severed by a wide gulf from the crude but not ignoble certainty, the superficial worship of progress which marked the Victorian era, so was Euripides severed from the “men of Marathon” for whom Æschylus wrote.

So it is that we can judge the poet of “the Greek enlightenment”[856]—or rather of the Athenian disillusionment—better than most generations of his readers. To aid us, there have naturally arisen writers to voice, in a manner often like his, our own disappointment and our renewed interest in parts of life and the world which we had ignored as unmeaning or barren. The disinherited are coming into their own. Mr. Thomas Hardy has written of the English peasant with a richness and profundity unknown since Shakespeare. He offers indeed another interesting analogy with Euripides: while the critics are concerned with his “pessimism” he remains for an unsophisticated reader a splendid witness to the majesty and charm of the immense slow curves of life, the deep preciousness which glows from the gradual processes of nature and that dignity of mere existence which survives all sin and effort. Tess of the D’Urbervilles is the best modern parallel to Hippolytus. Meanwhile M. Anatole France has given us many an example of that ironical wit of which the Greek poet is so consummate a master. Another Frenchman, Flaubert, has set as the climax to his dazzling phantasy, La Tentation de St. Antoine, an expression in un-attic vehemence and elaboration of that passionate sympathy with all existence which blazes in the lyrics of the Bacchæ—a yearning which Arnold in the Scholar-Gipsy has uttered in milder and still more haunting language.

There is no final synthesis of Euripides. Throughout his life he held true to those two principles, the worship of beauty, and loyalty to the dry light of intelligence. Glamour never blinded him to sin and folly; misery and coarse tyranny never taught his lips to forswear the glory of existence. One of his own noblest songs sets this triumphantly before us[857]:—

“I will not cease to mingle the Graces with the Muses—the sweetest of fellowships. When the Muses desert me, let me die; may the flower-garlands never fail me.” The Graces and the Muses—such is his better way of invoking Beauty and Truth, the two fixed stars of his life-long allegiance.