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174 of the dominant idea of Greek tragedy—that of an inevitable destiny, against which man struggles in vain—appears to have escaped her altogether. This is not surprising, since such a conception was entirely opposed to her own order of mind and to the age in which she lived. The root of all the social theories then prevailing was the value of the individual. Man was not a puppet of the gods, but the architect of his own fate. To lose hold of ideal virtue was to become incapable of governing or being governed; and ideal virtue was a definite entity which anybody might possess who chose. This—rather crudely stated—was Madame de Staël's point of view. Her enthusiasm rejected all idea of limited responsibilities. The ethical value of the Æschylean trilogy—the awful sense of overhanging doom which pervades it—did not appeal to her, because it tended to the annihilation of the struggling soul. In other words, she liked self-conscious drama, and was attracted to Euripides by his creation of artificial situations, in which interesting personages had room and leisure to explain themselves.

With Aristophanes she was frankly disgusted; from her didactic standpoint, because of his pronounced indecency; and on artistic grounds, because he attacked living individuals instead of creating characters, like Tartufe and Falstaff. To his beauties she remained entirely blind, and this, perhaps, is to be explained by her deficiency in the æsthetic faculty. It is said that Châteaubriand first taught her to appreciate nature, and Schlegel to perceive the loveliness of art. Chênedollé complained that she had lived for years opposite Lake Leman "without finding an image" in regard to it; and she herself once frankly admitted that of