Euripides and His Age

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

ally 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

hich 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 philos

fe, different conventions in art. It is these last that we must now deal with, for we shall find it hard eve

tere 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

of modern Opera. Looked at in cold blood, from outside the illusion, few forms of art could be more absurd, yet, I suppose, the emo

t 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 h

ymed 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. Th

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

s sincerity of treatment takes place inside

t is a long speech with no action to speak of; and it tells us not only the present situation of the characters-which is rather dull-but also what is going

The Prologue saved time here. But why does it let out the secret of what is coming? Why does it spoil the excitement beforehand? Because, we must answer, there is no secret, and the poet does not aim at that sort of excitement. A certain amount of plot-interest there certainly is: we are never told exactly what thing will happen but only what sort of thing; or we are told what will happen but not how it will happen. But the enjoyment which the poet aims at i

talking among themselves and not disposed to listen till their attention was captured by force. The Greek audience was, as far as we can make out, sitting in a religious silence. A prayer had been offered and incense burnt on the altar of Dionysus, and during such a ritual the rul

o the last scene but one and then, as a rule, sinking into a note of solemn calm. It often admits a quiet scene about the middle to let the play take breath; but it is very chary indeed of lifting and then dropping again, and never does so without definite reason. In pursuance of this plan, Euripides likes to have his ope

iting: the Trojan Women with its dim-seen angry gods; the Hecuba with its ruined city walls and desolate plain and the ghost of the murdered Polydorus brooding over them; the Hippolytus with its sinister goddess, potent and inexorable, who vanishes at the note of the hunting horn but is felt in the background throughout the whole play; the Iphigen?a, with its solitary and exiled priestess waiting at the doors of her strange temple of de

wift and wild with almost intolerable passion; but it will not come anywhere near the first scenes. We shall have a dialogue in longish speeches, each more or less balanced against its fellow, beautiful no doubt and perhaps moving, but slow as music is slow. Or we shall have a lyrical scene, strophe exactly balanced against antistrophe, more beautiful

incidents to throw light upon her. And our language would all the time be carefully naturalistic; not a bit-or, if the poet within us rebels, hardly a bit-more dignified than the average diction of afternoon tea. The ancient poet has no artifice at all. His heroine simply walks forward and exp

attempt to satisfy it, and yet has been so weakened by her long struggle that she will

llers in thi

d, looking tow

ther days tha

long hours thoug

e is wrecked! An

nowledge, not

makes for sorr

ight-for wit h

the last end s

oo soon weary,

s, setting be

far-off imag

elights beneat

cial kind of high poetry. And the women of the Chorus who are listening to it are like no kind of concrete earthly listeners; they are the sort of listeners that are suited to t

ll thi

e man that ho

ds up a mirro

girl-like, there

heart.-Be it

ans

weet is virtue

due meed in a

need for any original remark; what is needed is a note of h

peech paragraph by paragraph, and the printed page cannot, of course, illustrate the constant varieties of tension, of pace and of emphasis that are needed. But I find the following notes for the guidance of an actor opposite the Messenger's Speech in an old copy of my Hippolytus. Opposite the first lines comes, "Quiet, slow, simple." Then "quicker." "Big" (at "O Zeus . . . hated me.") Then "Drop tension: story." "Pause: more interest." "Mystery." "Awe; rising excitement." "Excitement well controlled." "Steady excitement; steady; swifter." "Up; excitement rising." "Up; but still controlled." "Up; full steam; let it go." "Highest point." "Down to quiet." "Mystery." "Pause." "End steady: with emotion." These not

it is partly the words, and partly the situation in which they are uttered. A Messenger's Speech ought not only to be a good story in itself, but it ought to be so prepared and led up to that before the speaker begins we are longing to hear what he has to say. An instance of a M

this land i

t a tale sha

see and tears of

urse wrongfully cursed, by his father, Theseus, has gone forth to exile. His friends and the w

of th

. Surely from t

ull of haste a

man in great haste ente

nc

ither shall

Is he in this

ted in her answer; she wants to ask a question. . . .

ad

ometh through

n gloom, evidently trying still to forget

nc

thee tidings

and to every

to the march

this is one of his son's servants? At

es

troke hath touch

cities of m

nc

. . . Nay, not

airsbreadth this

evidently a moment of shock, but how wi

as though

there some othe

e defiled, who

unt the Henchma

nc

am destroyed hi

. . . . The boon

e, O King, and

on the speaker? Or will he

es

And thou, Posei

ther. Thou hast

th it comes the horrible conviction that his curse

Speak on. How

slay the sham

senger begin

of the Chorus thinks she hears a noise in the distance; she is not sure. . . . Yes; a noise of fighting! She calls Electra, who comes, the sword in her hand. The noise increases; a cry; cheering. Something has happened, but what? The cheers sound like Argive voices; "Aegisth

from the man. "Who are you? . . . It is a plot!" She must get the sword. . . . The Man bids her look at him again; he is her brother's servant; she saw him wi

ially of so ending each scene as to make the spectator look eagerly for the next move. He must be given just enough notion of the future to whet his appetite; not enough to satisfy it. These are general rules that app

umbling-blocks to a modern reader of Greek tragedies, the

god's command (see above p. 66). The actual history of this epiphany is curious. As far as our defective evidence allows us to draw conclusions we can make out that Aeschylus habitually used a divine epiphany, but that he generally kept it for the last play of a trilogy; that he often had a whole galaxy of gods, and that, with some exceptions, his gods walked the floor of earth with the other actors. (The

us-in this case, of a machine-made god. Now devices of this sort-the sudden appearance of rich uncles, the discovery of new wills, or of infants changed at birth and the like-are more or less common weaknesses in romantic literature. Hence it was natural that Horace's view about Euripides's god should be uncritically accepted. But as a matter of fact it is a mere mistake. It never in any single case holds good-not even in the Orestes. And

probably nothing absurd, nothing even unlikely, in supposing the visible appearance of a god in such an atmosphere as that of tragedy. The heroes and heroines of tragedy were themselves almost divine; they were all figures in the great heroic saga and almost all of them-the evidence is clear-received actua

like them to be abrupt, thunderous, wrapped in mystery. We expect the style of ancient Hebrew or Norse poetry. Probably a Greek would th

ted above what he called "primaeval simplicity" as a similar man in Western Europe in the eighteenth or nineteenth century after. He was just beginning, with great daring and brilliance, to grasp at something like a philosophic or scientific

nstance, which close the Electra, the Hippolytus, the Rhesus or the Andromache. We have already seen in the Electra how the poet can use his gods for delivering his essential moral judgment on the story; the condemnation of revenge, the pity for mankind, the opening up of a larger atmosphere in which the horror through which we have just passed falls into its due

not watch man's

yes with the eff

terror now is

lowly rises an

pol

ll, most blessed

Thou wilt not

. . . . Father, t

I am not wroth

yed her al

fe and passion and sharp cries sink away into the telling of old fables; then the fables themselves have their lines of consequence reaching out to touch the present world and the thing that we are doing now; to make it the fulfilment of an ancient command or p

ng any tragedy; I only plead that if we use our imaginations we can find in it a very rare bea