Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/20

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EURIPIDES AND HIS WORK.

nitions were, however, as we shall see, no measure of his real popularity.

Enemies and detractors.Successful or not, he wrote on with the tireless, undaunted energy of genius. It was uphill work, for Euripides was above all things original, and originality, as the history of letters has often shown since, makes conquest of the judges of literature last. All conservatives in dramatic art, all who could think only in the old grooves, and appreciate the old simple music, all sticklers for convention, all railers against new ideas, all who found salvation only in the old religious and social formulas, all who shuddered to see bubbles pricked—these, (with probably the whole athletic interest) were, according to their lights, honestly opposed to him. All brawling demagogues and their jackals, all who despised their inferiors in wealth or birth, all friends of selfish, overbearing, and faithless Sparta, all who had something to gain by trading on the credulity and superstition of the populace, all who envied genius that soared beyond their vision, who sneered at the earnestness that spoke to the heart, the human sympathy that had love and admiration for poor peasants and trampled slaves—these were dishonestly opposed to him. The unsophisticated reader of Aristophanes will find it not easy (even with the assistance of eminent scholars) to comprehend how, headed by him, the comic poets could have attacked Euripides out of pure zeal for religion,^[1] for old-time simplicity and virtue, and how such as they could accuse him of "sapping the springs of civic manliness, of patriotism, and even of morality."

↑ "We must join with Aristophanes . . . in regarding him as a dramatist who degraded the moral and leligious dignity of his own sacred profession." (Donaldson, Theatre of the Greeks, p. 158.)
Sophocles was, we must conclude, so dull, that, failing to perceive ihat Athens was well rid of such a man, he set the example of the national mourning which followed on Euripides' death.

[1] "We must join with Aristophanes . . . in regarding him as a dramatist who degraded the moral and leligious dignity of his own sacred profession." (Donaldson, Theatre of the Greeks, p. 158.)
Sophocles was, we must conclude, so dull, that, failing to perceive ihat Athens was well rid of such a man, he set the example of the national mourning which followed on Euripides' death.

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