Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1898) v3.djvu/24

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no fewer than half of the extant tragedies of Euripides we find the intervention of a God introduced at the end of the play. In every case the deity speaks "from the machina," a stage contrivance by which the actor appeared to be throned upon clouds, or to be hovering in a winged chariot, or some similar device. From the fact that in the fourteen extant plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles only one such intervention occurs, we may fairly conclude that this was a distinctive feature of Euripides' work. This practice of his is by some scholars cited as a mark of his inferiority as an artist, as though he constructed his plots so clumsily as to get them into so hopeless a tangle at the end of the play that poetic justice could be secured only by violent supernatural interference. Now, whatever may have been the dramatist's motive, we may affirm unhesitatingly that it was not this. True, in two plays of Euripides, as in one of Sophocles, a God does intervene when the action has reached an impasse, the result of which threatens to be a contradiction of the legend on which the play is based, and an outrage on the spectators' sense of justice. But in no one case is this deadlock the direct outcome of the action. In the Philoctetes of Sophocles, the spectators would not have been surprised if the hero had finally yielded to the prayer of Neoptolemus; their surprise may well have been that he still hardened his heart. To some readers, his conceding, without the slightest demur, to a word from Herakles, that which he had not the magnanimity to grant to the almost irresistible persuasiveness of Neoptolemus' repentance and pleading, comes as a somewhat "lame and impotent conclusion:" he seems a smaller man. a less heroic hero. So, in the Orestes, the hero