Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1898) v3.djvu/22

xviii name, enter a valley of shadows of death where human experience has no chart for guidance, where human wisdom can but tremble, and human conscience shudder; and those who so fearfully and doubtingly watch them must hark back for light and leading to memories of glories marred by the sin now to be expiated, of link on link of ancient retribution to be consummated now.

In the Daughters of Troy and the Hecuba, on the other hand, the. chorus are themselves as much involved in the action of the drama as the chief actors, and the real protagonist, the martyr whose sufferings comprehend all partial woes, is neither Hecuba, nor Polyxena, nor Andromache, but Troy, whose past agony of leaguer and sack, and whose imminent fate in the persons of her exile-children, are designedly impressed upon the spectators.

2.—The nature of the immediate situation. "Fools," says Hesiod, "who know not how much greater is the half than the whole!" It is the inferior artist who does not know when reticence best befits, when silence is more eloquent than speech. There are in tragedy, situations which not only call for no comment, but where comment is sacrilege. One illustration may suffice. An act closes with a situation like that in which Polyxena is torn from her mother's arms (Hecuba, 443). What should the chorus say? They feel instinctively that this is the beginning of the end, the first of the final strokes of doom for Troy's exiles, and with shuddering anticipation they chant the lost ones' song of foreboding.

But it is not in these exceptional choral odes only, but in many, very many, of those which are closely relevant to the dramatic situation, that we find a certain element which is comparatively lacking in those of Aeschylus and Sophocles. It was a distinctive feature of Euripides' genius that every dramatic situation was to him fraught with a suggestiveness