Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1898) v3.djvu/21

Rh chorus, which is, not to furnish a running comment, necessary or superfluous, on act after act, but to impress on the spectators the deep lessons of the play, to strengthen faith, to quicken sympathy, to purge men of their selfishness (as Aristotle suggests) by the operation of pity and fear. The fact that the chorus in The Phœnician Maidens are strangers enables them to take an impartial view of the question at issue, and to pronounce on the side of justice. This is precisely what we miss in Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes, where they breathe no word hinting the faintest disapproval of the injustice and perjury of their king, which have brought about the war.

In the Iphigeneia at Aulis, the aloofness of the chorus invests the heroine with a certain majesty of loneliness in her awful trial, which throws her heroism into stronger relief, and reminds us that the Alpine summits of duty must be scaled alone.

So, in the Andromachê, the cautious reticence of the chorus, who, as subjects of the royal house, dare not utter their sentiments, imparts to the heroine a forlorn grandeur, which stimulates the spectators' sympathy and admiration.

In the Electra, the protagonists, daring a deed without a