LECTURE V.

Euripides-His merits and defects-Decline of tragic poetry through him— Comparison between the Choephora of Eschylus, the Electra of Sophocles, and that of Euripides-Character of the remaining works of the latter-The satirical drama-Alexandrian tragic poets.

WHEN We consider Euripides by himself, without any comparison with his predecessors, when we take a separate view of some of his better pieces, and detached scenes throughout the others, we cannot refuse to him an extraordinary degree of praise. But on the other hand when we place him in connexion with the history of art, when we consider his pieces as a whole, and reflect on the object which he appears in general to have had in view in all the works which have come down to us, we are compelled to bestow severe censure on him on various accounts. Of few writers may both good and evil be said with so much truth. He was a man of infinite ingenuity, and practised in the greatest variety of mental arts; but neither the sublime seriousness of mind, nor the severe wisdom, which we revere in Eschylus and Sophocles, regulated in him a luxuriant fulness of the most splendid and amiable qualities. His constant aim is to please by whatever means: and hence he is so very unequal to himself: frequently he has passages of the most overpowering beauty, and at other times he sinks into the most downright common-place. With all his errors he possesses an admirable ease and lightness, and a certain insinuating power which it is difficult to withstand.

These preliminary observations I have judged necessary, as it might otherwise be objected to me that I am at variance with myself, having a short time ago, in a small French treatise, endeavoured to show the superiority of a piece of Euripides, compared with an imitation of Racine. There I fixed my attention on a detached drama, and that one of the best of the works of this poet; but here I consider everything from the most general points of view, and with a reference to the highest demands of art, and must therefore justify my enthusiasm for ancient tragedy by a keen examination into the traces of its degeneracy and decline, that my predilection may not appear blind and extravagant.

We may compare a perfection in art and poetry to the summit of a steep mountain, where a load forced up with labour cannot long remain, but immediately rolls down the other side. It descends according to the laws of gravity with quickness and ease, and is seen with satisfaction; for the mass follows its natural in

clination, while the laborious ascent is in some degree a painful spectacle. Hence it happens, for example, that the paintings of periods during which art was on the decline are much more pleasing to the unlearned eye, than those which preceded the period of its perfection. The genuine connoisseur, on the other hand, will rank the pictures of a Zuccheri and others, who gave the tone when the great schools of the sixteenth century degenerated into empty and superficial mannerism, far below the works of a Mantegna, Perugino, and their contemporaries, in real and essential worth. Or let us suppose the highest perfection of art a focus: at an equal distance on the nearest and farthest side, the collected rays occupy the same space, but on this side they labour together in producing one common effect; whereas on the other they fly asunder, till at last they are altogether lost.

We have besides a particular reason for censuring without reserve the errors of this poet: namely, that our age is infected with the same vices with those which procured for Euripides so much favour, if not real respect, from his contemporaries. In our times we have seen a number of plays which, though in substance and form far below those of Euripides, bear yet in so far a resemblance to them, that they seduce and corrupt the feelings by means of effeminate, and sometimes even tender, emotions, while their general tendency is to produce a true moral licentiousness. What I shall say on this subject will not, for the most part, possess even novelty. Although the moderns have not unfrequently preferred Euripides to his two predecessors, and have unquestionably read, admired, and imitated him much more: whether attracted by the greater affinity of views and sentiments, or led astray by an opinion of Aristotle which they have not understood; it so happens however that many of the ancients, some of them even the contemporaries of Euripides, were of the same opinion with myself. In Anacharsis we find this mixture of praise and censure at least alluded to, though the author softens everything for the sake of his object of showing the Grecian productions of every description in the most advantageous light.

We possess some cutting sayings of Sophocles respecting Euripides, though he was so far from being actuated by anything like the jealousy of authorship, that he mourned his death, and, in a piece which was shortly after exhibited, refused to his actors the ornament of the floral crown. I consider myself warranted in viewing the accusation of Plato against the tragic poets, that they gave men too much up to the dominion of the passions, and rendered them effeminate by putting extravagant lamentations in the mouths of their heroes, as directed against Euripides alone; for with respect to his predecessors the injustice of them would

have been universally evident. The derisory attacks of Aristophanes are well known, though not sufficiently understood and appreciated. Aristotle bestows on him many a severe censure, and when he calls Euripides the most tragic of poets, he by no means ascribes to him the greatest perfection in the tragic art in general, but merely alludes to the effect which is produced by unfortunate catastrophes; for he immediately adds:" although he does not regulate other things well." The Scholiast of Euripides, too, contains many a short and forcible criticism on particular pieces, among which are perhaps preserved several of the opinions of the Alexandrian critics, those critics of whom Aristarchus, one of the number, from his judgment and acuteness, has had his name handed down to posterity, as a by-word for a literary judge.

In Euripides we no longer find the essence of the ancient tragedy in its pure and unmixed state; its characteristical features are already in part extinguished. We have already placed this essence in the prevailing idea of destiny, in the ideality of the composition, and in the signification of the chorus.

Euripides inherited, it is true, the idea of destiny from his predecessors, and his belief of it was sharpened by the tragic practice; but yet in him fate is seldom the invisible spirit of the whole composition, the radical thought of the tragic world. We have seen that this idea may be exhibited under severer or milder aspects; that the obscure terror of destiny may, in the connexion of a whole trilogy, be cleared up to the signification of a wise and beneficent providence. Euripides however has drawn it down from the region of the infinite; and inevitable necessity not unfrequently degenerates in him into the caprice of accident. He can no longer therefore give it its proper and peculiar direction, namely, by contrast and opposition, to elevate the moral liberty of man. How few of his pieces turn on the constant struggle with the decrees of fate, or even on a heroic subjection to them! His characters generally suffer because they must, and not because they will.

The mutual subordination of character and passion to ideal elevation, which we find observed in the same order in Sophocles, and in the plastic artists of the Greeks, Euripides has completely reversed. Passion is the principal object with him; his next care is for character, and when these endeavours leave him still any remaining room, he occasionally seeks to connect grandeur and dignity with the more frequent display of amiable attractions.

It has been already admitted that the persons in tragedy ought not to be all equally exempt from error, as there would then be no opposition among them, and consequently no room for a plot. But Euripides has, as Aristotle observes, frequently painted his

characters in black colours without any necessity, as for example, his Menelaus in Orestes. He was warranted by the traditions sanctioned by popular belief, in attributing great crimes to many of the old heroes, but he invented besides many base and paltry traits for them of his own free inclination. It was by no means the object of Euripides to represent the race of heroes as towering above the men of his own age by their gigantic stature; he rather endeavours to fill up, or to build over, the chasm between his contemporaries and that wonderful world of old, and to surprise the gods and heroes in their undress, a mode of observation, it is usually said, of which no greatness can stand the test. He introduces his spectators to a sort of familiar acquaintance with them; he does not draw the supernatural and fabulous into the circle of humanity (which we praised in Sophocles,) but within the limits of imperfect individuality. This is the meaning of Sophocles, when he said that he himself painted men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they actually were. Not that his own persons are always represented as models of irreproachable behaviour; his opinion referred merely to ideal elevation and sweetness in character and manners. It seems as if Euripides was always well pleased to be enabled to say to his spectators, See! those beings were men, had exactly the same weaknesses, and acted from the same motives as yourselves, and even the lowest among you. He paints therefore with particular love and complacency the defects and moral failings of his characters, and he even allows them to make a disclosure of them in naive self-confessions. They are frequently not merely undignified, but they even boast of their imperfections.

The chorus is for the most part in him an unessential ornament: its songs are frequently wholly episodical, without any reference to the action, and more distinguished for brilliancy than for sublimity and true inspiration. "We must consider

the chorus," says Aristotle, "as one of the actors, and as a part of the whole; it must enter into the action: not as in Euripides, but as Sophocles has done." The ancient comic writers enjoyed the privilege of allowing the chorus occasionally to address the spectators in its own name; this was called a parabasis, and, as I shall afterwards show, was suitable to the spirit of comedy. Although the practice is by no means tragical, it was however, according to the testimony of Julius Pollux, frequently adopted by Euripides in his dramas, who so far forgot himself on some of those occasions, that, in the Danaidæ for instance, the chorus, which consisted of females, made use of grammatical inflexions which belonged only to the male sex.

This poet has thus at the same time destroyed the internal es

sence of tragedy, and sinned against the laws of beauty and proportion in its external structure. He generally sacrifices the whole to the effect of particular parts, and in these he is also more ambitious of foreign attractions than of genuine poetical beauty.

In the accompanying music, he adopted all the innovations invented by Timotheus, and selected those melodies which were most in unison with the effeminacy of his poetry. He proceeded in the same manner with his syllabic measures; his versification is luxuriant and breaks through every rule. The same diluted and effeminate character would, on a more profound investigation, be unquestionably found to belong also to the rhythmi of his choral songs.

On all occasions he exhibits to satiety those charms that are merely of a corporeal nature, which Winkelmann calls a flattery of the coarse external senses; whatever is calculated to excite, to strike, and to produce a strong effect without true worth for the mind and the feelings. He labours for effect in a degree which cannot be allowed to the tragic poet. For example, he hardly ever omits an opportunity of throwing his characters into a sudden and useless terror; his aged persons are always complaining of the wants and helplessness of age, and crawl with trembling joints up the ascent from the orchestra to the stage, which frequently represented the declivity of a mountain, sighing over the misery of their situation. He is always endeavouring to move, and for the sake of emotion he not only violates probability but even the connexion of his pieces. He is strong in his pictures of misfortune; but he often claims our compassion, not for the inward agony of the soul, nor for pain which the suffering individual endeavours to overcome, and to bear with manly fortitude, but for the unreserved expression of bodily misery. He is fond of reducing his heroes to the condition of beggars, of allowing them to suffer hunger and want, of exhibiting them with all the external signs of mendicity, and displaying their tattered rags, as Aristophanes has so humourously remarked in his Acharna.

Euripides was a frequenter of the schools of the philosophers, (he was a scholar of Anaxagoras, and not of Socrates, as many have erroneously stated, having only been connected with the latter by social intercourse;) and he displays a particular vanity in introducing philosophical doctrines on all occasions, in my opinion in a very imperfect manner, as we should not be able to understand these doctrines from him if we were not before acquainted with them. He conceives it too vulgar a thing to believe in the gods in the simple manner of the people, and he