Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1898) v3.djvu/23

Rh which kindled his imagination, which stirred his human sympathy, which flashed upon his soul revelations of the problems of existence. Hence his choral odes are generally in themselves beautiful poems, interesting apart from their context. Doubtless the new departure was welcomed by the Athenian audience generally, who, after having, in the course of two generations, listened to some hundreds of formally relevant odes, must have become fairly expert in forecasting what an average chorus would sing, and might be spared the reproach of "decadence" in taste, if they longed for a little relief from the too-obvious comment, the inevitable moralizing. They were somewhat in the position of our fathers who, after enduring for two generations the bards who boasted Pope for their master, and held his style to be the "last word" in English poetry, hailed with glad surprise the strange freshness of Cowper's note, and ere long wondered to find themselves still so young in spirit as to be enthralled by the romance of Scott and Byron. The new style was, of course, not without its dangers: it was a bow of Ulysses which only the master-hand could bend. It became a snare to weaker men, in whom talent and graceful play of fancy took the place of genius and inspired imagination. So Agathon and his successors wrote the pretty poems which the great critic was soon to brand as empty of the soul of tragedy. The style of Euripides was the style of Euripides, not of a school of imitators. But that his innovation was, in his hands, not perfectly legitimate, it has been left to Schlegel and his disciples to detect, with a penetration which has discerned that which eluded the judicial acumen of Aristotle, and even the keen-eyed hatred of Aristophanes.