CHAPTER VII.

GREEK TRAGEDY AND EURIPIDES.

Two Conditions for the development of a national Drama.-The Attic audience.-The Persian War.-Nemesis the cardinal idea of Greek Tragedy.-Traces of the doctrine of Nemesis in early Greek Poetry. -The fixed material of Greek Tragedy.- Athens in the age of Euripides. Changes introduced by him in Dramatic Art.-The law of progress in all art.-Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.-The treatment of evvxía by Euripides. -Menoikeus.-The death of Eteocles and Polynices. Polyxena. Medea. - Hippolytus. — Electra and Orestes. -Injustice done to Euripides by recent critics.

CRITICS who are contented with referring the origin of the Greek drama to the mimetic instinct inherent in humanity are apt to neglect those circumstances which render it an almost unique phenomenon in literature. If the mimetic instinct were all that is requisite for the origination of a national drama, then we should find that every race at a certain period of its development produced both tragedy and comedy. This, however, is far from being the case. A certain rude mimesis, such as the acting of descriptive dances or the jesting of buffoons and mummers, is indeed common in all ages and nations. But there are only two races which can be said to have produced the drama as a fine art originally and independently of foreign influences. These are the Greeks and the Hindhus. With reference to the Hindhus, it is even questionable whether they would have composed plays so perfect as their famous "Sakountala" without contact with the Hellenes. All the products of the modern drama, whether tragic or comic, must be regarded as the direct progeny of the Greek stage. The habit of playacting, continued from Athens to Alexandria, and from Rome

to Byzantium, never wholly expired. The "Christus Patiens," attributed to Gregory of Nazianzum, was an adaptation of the art of Euripides to Christian story; and the representation of "Mysteries" during the middle ages kept alive the dramatic tradition, until the discovery of classic literature and the revival of taste in modern Europe led to the great works of the English, Spanish, French, and subsequently of the German theatre.

Something more than the mere instinct of imitation, therefore, caused the Greeks to develop their drama. Like sculpture, like the epic, the drama was one of the artistic forms through which the genius of the Greek race expressed itself-—by which, to use the language of philosophical mysticism, it fulfilled its destiny as a prime agent in the manifestation of the WorldSpirit. In their realization of that perfect work of art for which they seem to have been specially ordained, the drama was no less requisite than sculpture and architecture, than the epic, the ode, and the idyll.

Two conditions, both of which the Greeks enjoyed in great perfection at the moment of their first dramatic energy, seem to be requisite for the production of a great and thoroughly national drama. These are, first, an era of intense activity, or a period succeeding immediately to one of excitement, by which the nation has been nobly agitated; secondly, a public worthy of the dramatist, spurring him on by its enthusiasm and intelligence to the creation of high works of art. A glance at the history of the drama in modern times will prove how necessary these conditions are. It was the gigantic effort which we English people made in our struggle with Rome and Spain, it was the rousing of our keenest thought and profoundest emotion by the Reformation, which prepared us for the Elizabethan drama, by far the greatest, next to the Greek, in literature. The nation lived in action, and delighted to see great actions imitated. Races in repose or servitude, like the Hebrews under the Roman Empire, may, in their state of

spiritual exaltation and by effort of pondering on the mysteries of God and man, give birth to new theosophies; but it requires a free and active race, in which young and turbulent blood is flowing, to produce a drama. In England, again, at that time, there was a great public. All classes crowded to the theatres. London, in whose streets and squares martyrs had been 'burned, on whose quays the pioneers of the Atlantic and Pacific, after disputing the Indies with Spain, lounged and enjoyed their leisure, supplied an eager audience, delighting in the dreams of poets which recalled to mind the realities of their own lives, appreciating the passion of tragedy, enjoying the mirth of comic incident. The men who listened to Othello had both done and suffered largely; their own experience was mirrored in the scenes of blood and struggle set before them. These two things, therefore, the awakening of the whole English nation to activity, and the presence of a free and haughty audience,-made our drama great.

In the Spanish drama only one of the requisite conditions was fulfilled-activity. Before they began to write plays the Spaniards had expelled the Moors, discovered the New World, and raised themselves to the first place among European nations. But there was not the same free audience in Spain as in England. Papal despotism and the tyranny of the Court checked and coerced the drama, so that, with all its richness and imaginative splendour, the Spanish theatre is inferior to the English. The French drama suffered still more from the same kind of restriction. Subject to the canons of scholastic pedants, tied down to an imitation of the antique, made to reflect the manners and sentiments of a highly artificial Court, animated by the sympathies of no large national audience, the French playwrights became courtiers, artists obedient to the pleasures of a king-not, like the dramatists of Greece and England, the prophets of the people, the leaders of a chorus triumphant and rejoicing in its mighty deeds.

Italy has no real theatre. In Italy there has been no stirring of a national, united spirit ; no supreme and central audience; no sudden consciousness of innate force and freedom in the sovereign people. The requisite conditions have always failed. The German drama, both by its successes and shortcomings, illustrates the same position. Such greatness as it achieved in Goethe and Schiller it owed to the fermentation of German nationality, to the so-called period of "storm and stress" which electrified the intellects of Germany and made the Germans eager to assert their manhood among nations. But listen to Goethe complaining that there was no public to receive his works; study the petty cabals of Weimar; estimate the imitative and laborious spirit of German art; and it is clear why Germany produced but scattered and imperfect results in the drama.

The examples of England, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, all tend to prove that for the creation of a drama it is necessary that the condition of national activity should be combined with the condition of a national audience-not an audience of courtiers, or critics, or learned persons. In Greece, both of these conditions were united in unrivalled and absolute perfection. While in England, during the Elizabethan period, the public which crowded our theatres were uncultivated, and formed but a small portion of the free nation they represented -in Athens the whole people, collectively and in a body, witnessed the dramatic shows provided for them in the theatre of Bacchus. That theatre had space for 30,000 spectators, so that the total male population of Athens could enter it, and at the same moment attend to the tragedies or comedies of rival playwrights.* The same set of men, when assembled in the Pnyx, constituted the national assembly; and in that capacity made laws, voted supplies, declared wars, ratified alliances, ruled the affairs of dependent cities. In a word, they were * See Leake's Topography of Athens, vol. i. p. 521.

Athens. Every man among them-by intercourse with the greatest spirits of the Greek world in the Agora and porches of the wrestling-grounds, by contemplation of the sculptures of Pheidias, by familiarity with Eleusinian processions, by participation in solemn sacrifices and choric dances, by listening to the recitations of Homer, by attendance on the lectures of the sophists, by debates in the Ecclesia, by pleadings in the law-courts had been multifariously educated and rendered capable of appreciating the subtleties of rhetoric and argument, as well as of comprehending the æsthetical beauty with which a Greek play was enriched. It is easy to imagine the influence which this potent, multitudinous, and highly cultivated audience must have exercised over the dramatists, and what an impulse it must have communicated to their genius. In England the playwright and the actor were both looked down upon with pity or contempt; they wrote and acted for money in private speculations, and in rivalry with several petty theatres. In Athens the tragedian was honoured. Sophocles was elected a general with Pericles, and a member of the provisional government after the dissolution of the old democracy. The actor, too, was respected. The State itself defrayed the expenses of the drama and no ignoble competition was possible between tragedian and tragedian, since all exhibited their plays to the same audience, in the same sacred theatre, and all were judged by the same judges.

The critical condition of the Greek people itself at the epoch of the drama is worth minute consideration. During the two previous centuries, the whole of Hellas had received a long and careful education: at their conclusion came the terrible convulsion of the Persian war. After the decay of the old monarchies, the Greek states seethed for years in the process of dissolution and reconstruction. The colonies had been founded. The aristocratic families had striven with the mob in every city; and from one or the other power at times