Page:Euripides and his age.djvu/229

Rh something like a philosophic or scientific view of the world; but his hold was very precarious and partial, and when it slipped he fell unsuspectingly into strange abysses. A visible god in the theatre laid probably no more strain on his credulity than, say, a prophetic dream on ours.

However, the above considerations are only pleas in mitigation of sentence. They tend to show that the Deus ex Mâchinâ was not in itself ridiculous to the contemporaries of Euripides; we must go further and try to see why he liked it. The best way is simply, with our antecedent prejudices removed, to read and re-read some of the best epiphany scenes; those, for instance, which close the Electra, the Hippolytus, the Rhesus or the Andromache. We have already seen in the Electra how the poet can use his gods for delivering his essential moral judgment on the story; the condemnation of revenge, the pity for mankind, the opening up of a larger atmosphere in which the horror through which we have just passed falls into its due resting-place. In the Hippolytus the sheer beauty of the Artemis scene speaks for itself and makes a marvellous ending. Notably it attains an effect which could scarcely be reached