Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/700

Rh 674 EURIPIDES he was seventy-four. Sophocles followed him in a few mouths, but not before he had been able to honour the memory of his younger rival by causing his actors to appear with less than the full costume of the Dionysiac festival. Soon afterwards, in the Frogs, Aristophanes pro nounced the epitaph of Attic Comedy on Attic Tragedy. The historical interest of such a life as that of Euripides consists in the very fact that its external record is so scanty that, unlike /Eichylus or Sophocles, he had no place in the public action of his time, but dwelt apart as a student and a thinker. He has made his Medea speak of those who, through following quiet paths, have incurred the reproach of apathy (p^Ovfuav). Undoubtedly enough of the old feeling for civic life remained to create a prejudice against one who held aloof from the affairs of the city. Quietness (a.Trpa.y/j.ocrvvr)), in this sense, was still regarded as akin to indolence (dpyt a). Yet just here we see how truly Euripides was the precursor of that near future which, at Athens, saw the more complete divergence of society from the state. His work is his biography. The first requisite for a just appreciation, both of the artist and of the man, is rightly to apprehend the conditions under which his work was done. In an age which is not yet ripe for reflection or for the subtle analysis of character, people are content to express in general types those primiry facts of human nature which strike every one. Achilles will stand well enough for the young chivalrous warrior, Odysseus for the man of resource and endurance, even without such elaboration of detail as would enable us surely to recognize the very man to say, if we met him, this is the Achilles, the OJysseus, whose exact portrait we know. The poetry of such an age presents types rather than individuals. In the case of the Greeks, these types had not merely an artistic and a moral interest ; they had, further, a religious interest, because the Greeks believed that the epic heroes, sprang from the gods, were their own anc3stors. Direct lineage was the ground on which the Greeks trusted that the Greek gods would help them against other men, speak ing barbarian tongues, and other gods, the progenitors of barbarians. Greek Tragedy arose when the choral worship of Dionysus, the god of physical rapture, had engrafted upon it a dialogue between actors who represented some persons of the legends consecrated by this faith. Now, in order that the representation should express these persons without transgressing the typical character of the legends themselves, and thereby straining or lowering this faith, it is necessary to observe a limit. The dramatist was obliged to refrain from multiplying those minute touches which, by individualizing the characters too highly, would bring them closer, indeed, to daily experience, but would detract from their general value as types in which all Hellenic humanity could recognize its own image glorified and raised a step nearer to the immortal gods. This necessity was further enforced by the existence of the Chorus, the original element oHlie drama, and the very essence of its nature as an act of Dionysiac worship. Those utterances of the Chorus, which to the modern sense ara so often platitudes, were not so to the Greeks, just because the moral issues of Tragedy were felt to have the same typical generality as these comments themselves. ^An unerring instinct keeps both vEschylus and Sophocles within the limits imposed by this law. Euripides was only fifteen years younger than Sophocles. But, when Euripides began to write it must have been clear to any man of his genius and culture that, though an established prestige might be maintained, a now poet who sought to construct Tragedy on the old basis would be building on sand. For, first, the popular religion itself the very foundation of Tragedy had been under mined. Secondly, scepticism had begun to be busy with New the legends which that religion consecrated. Neither gods ditio nor heroes commanded all the old unquestioning faith. w j|i h. Lastly, an increasing number of the audience in the theatre g ur ^, began to be destitute of the training, mu?ical and poetical, had i which had prepared an earlier generation to enjoy the deal, chaste and placid grandeur of ideal Tragedy. Euripides made a splendid effort to maintain the place Hist of Tragedy in the spiritual life of Athens by modifying its to m interests in the sense which his own generation required. thenc Could not the heroic persons still excite interest if they were made more real, if, in them, the passions and sorrows of every-day life were portrayed with greater vividness and directness 1 And might not the less cultivated part of the audience at least enjoy a thrilling plot, especially if taken from the home-legends of Attica 1 Euripides became the virtual founder of the Romantic Drama. In so far as his Obst work fails, the failure is one which probably no artistic to ll! tact could then have wholly avoided. The frame within su which he had to work was one which could not be stretched to his plan. The chorus, the masks, the narrow stage, the conventional costumes, the slender opportunities for change of- scenery, were so many fixed obstacles to the free development of Tragedy in the new direction. But no man of his time could have broken free from these traditions ; in attempting to do so he must have wrecked either his fame or his art. It is not the fault of Euripides if in so much of his work we feel the want of harmony between matter and form. Art abhors compromise ; and it was the mis fortune of Attic Tragedy in his generation that nothing but a compromise could save it. A word must be said on the two devices which have become common phrases of reproach against him the prologue, and the deus ex machina. Doubtless the prologue is a slipshod T 10 and sometimes ludicrous expedient. But it should be ^ ogui remembered that the audiences of his days were far from being so well versed as their fathers in the mythic lore, and that, on the other hand, a dramatist who wished to avoid trite themes had now to go into the by-ways of mythology. A prologue was often perhaps desirable or necessary for the instruction of the audience. As regards the deus ex machina, a distinction should be observed The .&amp;lt; between those cases in which the solution is really ex. m mechanical, as in the Andromache and perhaps the Orestes, and those in which it is warranted or required by the plot, as in the Ilippolytns and the ftacchw. Tlie choral songs in Euripides, it may be granted at once, have often nothing to do with the action. But the chorus was Tlic the greatest of difficulties for a poet who was seeking to I&quot; 11 &quot; 1 present drama of romantic tendency in the plastic form consecrated by tradition. So far from censuring Euripides on this score, we should be disposed to regard his manage ment of the chorus as a signal proof of his genius, originality, and skill In a poetical career of about fifty years Euripides is said Worl to have written 92 dramas, including 8 satyr-plays. The best critics of antiquity allowed 75 as genuine. Nauck has collected 1117 Euripidean fragments. Among these, numbers 1092-1117 are doubtful or spurious ; numbers 842-1091 are from plays of uncertain title;* numbers 1-841 represent fifty-five lost pieces, among which some of the best known are the Andromeda, Antiope, Bellerophon, Cresphontes, Erectheus, (Edipus, Pkaethon, and Telephus. (1.) The Alcestis, as the didascalise tell us, was brought Alcet out in Ol. 85. 2, i.e., at the Dionysia in the spring of 438 B.C., as the fourth play of a tetralogy comprising the Cretan Women, the Alcmceon at Psophis, and the Telephus. The Alcestis is altogether removed from the character, essentially grotesque, of a mere satyric drama. On the other hand, it