Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/35

poverty did not starve out true manhood, nor rags degrade it. He would not be contented with the conventional exclusiveness of a vocabulary which bade fair to become too narrow for the thoughts which were demanding expression; but his enrichments no more made it "more commonplace" than Shakspeare made English poetry more commonplace by his use of law-terms, or Tennyson by the touches he drew from science, or by the words he rescued from half-oblivion on rustic lips.

The "Forensic Debates."He laid bare the human heart not only in the ecstasies and agonies of its love, in the shudderings of its haunting fears, in the sacredness of its grief, in the exaltation of high resolve, but also in those darker processes of the mind wherein the sinner wrestles with his own conscience, and would fain justify his transgression before God and man. With a subtle instinct he perceived how prone the evil-doer is to evade the broad issues of right and wrong, and to seek refuge in a multitude of separately casuistic or irrelevant pleas, to essay to make a strong chain out of many defective links, as though an untenable position could, by occupying all available outposts, be made to seem unassailable.^[1] So a Helen shifts from plea to plea to excuse her faithlessness: a Jason marshals all the audacious sophisms of egotism: a Klytemnestra demands new canons of right and wrong to suit her special case: or an Eteocles desperately claims that justice shall give way when injustice proffers the whole world as a bribe. The smiling hypocrisy, the plausible evasion, the naked cynicism, the angry obstinacy of those whom the strong delusion of selfishness constrains to believe a lie—Euripides unveils them all; but it