Page:Euripides (Mahaffy).djvu/70

64 could prove more attractive than this beautiful legend, and yet no one has rivalled or even approached in excellence its treatment by Euripides. This play has had its enemies too, especially among the strict classicists, who are offended by the miraculous elements, and the comic vein which it contains. It may be enough to cite among its defenders Racine, who turns aside, in the preface to his Iphigénie, to defend it from these shallow attacks, and Alfieri, whose first reading of it was an epoch in his intellectual life.

46. I have now said enough to indicate how far Euripides anticipated the modern notion of an intricate plot, which is intended, apart from character drawing, to fix the attention of the hearer. We see in him the originator of this kind of drama, which Sophocles seems to have adopted from him in the days of their rivalry, but which ancient critics unanimously ascribed to the fertile invention of the younger poet. The devices were indeed not very complicated: an intrigue devised by the actors, which is defeated by Destiny—as in the Iphigenias; a pathetic recognition (the adopted by the genteel comedy), such as those in the Ion, the Helena, and Tauric Iphigenia; in not a few an apparent miscarriage of Divine Providence, which is only rectified after severe trials of patience and of character. But the idea of weaving a complicated web to be unravelled on the stage is there, and was sure to bear its fruit.