Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/294

270 truth! In this point, as in others, the over-comprehensiveness of Euripides's mind led him into artistic sins, and made much of his work a great and fascinating failure.

There are two plays, one early and one late, in which the divine element is treated with more consistency, and, it would seem, with some real expression of the poet's thought—the Hippolytus and the Bacchæ. The Love-goddess in the former (428 ) is a Fact of Nature personified; her action is destructive, not (l. 20) personally vindictive; her bodily presence in the strangely-terrible speech which forms the prologue, is evidently mere symbolism, representing thoughts that are as much at home in a modern mind as in an ancient. Hippolytus is a saint in his rejection of the Cyprian and his cleaving to the virgin Artemis; it is absurd to talk of his 'impiety.' Yet it is one of the poet's rooted convictions that an absolute devotion to some one principle—the 'All or nothing' of Brand, the 'Truth' of Gregers Werle—leads to havoc. The havoc may be, on the whole, the best thing: it is clear that Hippolytus 'lived well,' that his action was ; but it did, as a matter of fact, produce malediction and suicide and murder. Very similar is the unseen Artemis of the end, so beautiful and so superhumanly heartless. The fresh virginity in nature, the spirit of wild meadows and waters and sunrise, is not to be disturbed because martyrs choose to die for it.

The Bacchæ is a play difficult to interpret. For excitement, for mere thrill, there is absolutely nothing like it in ancient literature. The plot is as simple as it is daring. The god Dionysus is disowned by his own kindred, and punishes them. There comes to