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.:“Ægyptus, as the far-spread story tells,With fifty sons in voyage o’er the deepLanding at Argos....”Æsch.: (interrupting) ... “lost his flask of oil”.
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.:
“Ægyptus, as the far-spread story tells,With fifty sons in voyage o’er the deepLanding at Argos....”
“Ægyptus, as the far-spread story tells,With fifty sons in voyage o’er the deepLanding at Argos....”
“Ægyptus, as the far-spread story tells,With fifty sons in voyage o’er the deepLanding at Argos....”
“Ægyptus, as the far-spread story tells,
With fifty sons in voyage o’er the deep
Landing at Argos....”
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 thecæsuraoccurs 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 hearersau faitwith 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 theFrogsDionysus 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 theMedea, 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 offereda “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:
ἥξει γὰρ αὐτὸς σὴν δάμαρτα καὶ τέκνα,ἕλξων φονεύσων κἄμ’ ἐπισφάξων ἄναξ·μένοντι δ’ αὐτοῦ πάντα σοὶ γενήσεται,τῇ τ’ ἀσφαλείᾳ κερδανεῖς· πόλιν δὲ σὴνμὴ πρὶν ταράξῃς πρὶν τόδ’ εὖ θέσθαι, τέκνον,
ἥξει γὰρ αὐτὸς σὴν δάμαρτα καὶ τέκνα,ἕλξων φονεύσων κἄμ’ ἐπισφάξων ἄναξ·μένοντι δ’ αὐτοῦ πάντα σοὶ γενήσεται,τῇ τ’ ἀσφαλείᾳ κερδανεῖς· πόλιν δὲ σὴνμὴ πρὶν ταράξῃς πρὶν τόδ’ εὖ θέσθαι, τέκνον,
ἥξει γὰρ αὐτὸς σὴν δάμαρτα καὶ τέκνα,ἕλξων φονεύσων κἄμ’ ἐπισφάξων ἄναξ·μένοντι δ’ αὐτοῦ πάντα σοὶ γενήσεται,τῇ τ’ ἀσφαλείᾳ κερδανεῖς· πόλιν δὲ σὴνμὴ πρὶν ταράξῃς πρὶν τόδ’ εὖ θέσθαι, τέκνον,
ἥξει γὰρ αὐτὸς σὴν δάμαρτα καὶ τέκνα,
ἕλξων φονεύσων κἄμ’ ἐπισφάξων ἄναξ·
μένοντι δ’ αὐτοῦ πάντα σοὶ γενήσεται,
τῇ τ’ ἀσφαλείᾳ κερδανεῖς· πόλιν δὲ σὴν
μὴ πρὶν ταράξῃς πρὶν τόδ’ εὖ θέσθαι, τέκνον,
or a hundred others, with the beacon-speech inAgamemnonor 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 fromMacbeth, 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 theMedea; Lycus in theHeraclesturns 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 andtortures Phædra, while to Helen inOrestesit means little more than a picturesque melancholy. Hermione inAndromacheand 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 areso 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’sCherry Orchardor 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 inVanity Fairbecome 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 isalive, 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. TheHippolytusremains 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 recentdictumthat “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 thesetwo 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 theMedeaand theIphigenia in Taurisone 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:
στίλβουσι δ’ ὥστε ποταμίου κύκνου πτερόν,[845]
στίλβουσι δ’ ὥστε ποταμίου κύκνου πτερόν,[845]
στίλβουσι δ’ ὥστε ποταμίου κύκνου πτερόν,[845]
στίλβουσι δ’ ὥστε ποταμίου κύκνου πτερόν,[845]
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 theTroadesand at the close of his life culminates in the splendours of theBacchæ. 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. TheAndromedaand thePhaethonwould 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 asthe playwright often makes of his drama, among other things, an elaboratereductio ad absurdumof myth, so is he capable of writing a whole scene with a twinkle in his eye. The clearest example is theHelena; Menelaus’ stupefaction at learning that Egypt contains an Helen, daughter of Zeus, is indeed definite comedy:
Διὸς δ’ ἔλεξε παῖδά νιν πεφυκέναι.ἀλλ’ ἦ τις ἔστι Ζηνὸς ὄνομ’ ἔχων ἀνήρΝείλου παρ’ ὄχθας; εἷς γὰρ ὅ γε κατ’ οὐρανόν.[846]
Διὸς δ’ ἔλεξε παῖδά νιν πεφυκέναι.ἀλλ’ ἦ τις ἔστι Ζηνὸς ὄνομ’ ἔχων ἀνήρΝείλου παρ’ ὄχθας; εἷς γὰρ ὅ γε κατ’ οὐρανόν.[846]
Διὸς δ’ ἔλεξε παῖδά νιν πεφυκέναι.ἀλλ’ ἦ τις ἔστι Ζηνὸς ὄνομ’ ἔχων ἀνήρΝείλου παρ’ ὄχθας; εἷς γὰρ ὅ γε κατ’ οὐρανόν.[846]
Διὸς δ’ ἔλεξε παῖδά νιν πεφυκέναι.
ἀλλ’ ἦ τις ἔστι Ζηνὸς ὄνομ’ ἔχων ἀνήρ
Νείλου παρ’ ὄχθας; εἷς γὰρ ὅ γε κατ’ οὐρανόν.[846]
“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 theMedeathe 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-wittedamiable 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 playOrestes. 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 dejectedlyHis seat upon the intellectual throne;And all his store of sad experience heLays bare of wretched days![852]
Amongst us one,Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedlyHis seat upon the intellectual throne;And all his store of sad experience heLays bare of wretched days![852]
Amongst us one,Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedlyHis seat upon the intellectual throne;And all his store of sad experience heLays bare of wretched days![852]
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]
Though far beyond my ken a wise man dwell,Across the earth I greet him for a friend.[854]
Though far beyond my ken a wise man dwell,Across the earth I greet him for a friend.[854]
Though far beyond my ken a wise man dwell,
Across the earth I greet him for a friend.[854]
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 aviditywhere 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’Urbervillesisthe best modern parallel toHippolytus. 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 theBacchæ—a yearning which Arnold in theScholar-Gipsyhas 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]:—
οὐ παύσομαι τὰς ΧάριταςΜούσαις συγκαταμειγνύς,ἁδίσταν συζυγίαν.μὴ ζῴην μετ’ ἀμουσίας,αἰεὶ δ’ ἐν στεφάνοισιν εἴην.
οὐ παύσομαι τὰς ΧάριταςΜούσαις συγκαταμειγνύς,ἁδίσταν συζυγίαν.μὴ ζῴην μετ’ ἀμουσίας,αἰεὶ δ’ ἐν στεφάνοισιν εἴην.
οὐ παύσομαι τὰς ΧάριταςΜούσαις συγκαταμειγνύς,ἁδίσταν συζυγίαν.μὴ ζῴην μετ’ ἀμουσίας,αἰεὶ δ’ ἐν στεφάνοισιν εἴην.
οὐ παύσομαι τὰς Χάριτας
Μούσαις συγκαταμειγνύς,
ἁδίσταν συζυγίαν.
μὴ ζῴην μετ’ ἀμουσίας,
αἰεὶ δ’ ἐν στεφάνοισιν εἴην.
“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.