Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/21

 strengthened by the scene in the "Acharnians" (the really pointed criticisms of Aristophanes upon Euripides are to be found elsewhere), in which the needy citizen calls on Euripides and begs for some of the rags in which he has been wont to clothe his heroes; and the tragic poet tells his servant to look for the rags of Telephus between those of Thyestes and those of Ino. But the very strength of Euripides lay in a deep and tender compassion for human suffering: if he had done nothing worse to his heroes than to give them rags and crutches, his power could have kept for them at least the sympathy due to the sordid miseries of men; he would only have substituted a severely human for an ideal pathos. His real fault lay in the admission of sophistic debate. A drama cannot be an artistic whole in which the powers supposed to control the issues of the action represent a given theory of moral government, while the agents are from time to time employing the resources of rhetorical logic to prove that this theory is either false or doubtful.

Between these two contrasted conceptions—the austere transcendentalism of Æschylus and the sophistic realism of Euripides—stands the conception of Sophocles. But Sophocles is far nearer to Æschylus than to Euripides; since Sophocles and Æschylus have this affinity, that the art of both is ideal. The heroic form is in outline almost the same for Sophocles as for Æschylus; but meanwhile there has passed over it such a change as came over the statue on which the sculptor gazed