Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/54

context, lines which would in a domestic wrangle hit the wife hard. But modern scholarship can hardly claim sober critical judgment as its distinguishing feature so long as quotations are in this unfair way given as though they expressed the mind of the poet.

"The human."Euripides speaks not only for women, but for the many whose souls were in his day troubled by the riddle of the painful earth. More perhaps than any other ancient writer he reveals to us the true inner Greek life, lays bare the secrets of its hearts. The fancy of our modern poet-aesthetes, that the Greeks revelled in a careless buoyancy of existence, in which beings of perfect mould moved in a dream of beauty through a fairyland of marble fashionings, their thoughts kindling with music and song, and anon uplifted in serene philosophies—this fades away into a dim background, and the sad earnest faces grow upon us, the hearts that strain beneath the burden of duty, the souls that weary over the problems of right and wrong, the voices that moan the unanswered question touching the mystery of suffering, the women who beat against the bars of convention and prescription, who wail for sympathy and plead for trust—these who were too mean for Aeschylus' regard, too un-ideal for Sophocles, these of whom Socrates took no heed, to whom he left no legacy, to whose heart-hunger Plato offered the stones of his ideal city. To all such Euripides stretched the brother hand of one who had also passed through deep waters, who had faced the spectres of the mind, who sighed with them that were desolate and oppressed, who came close to each bereaved heart, sorrowing with stricken parents, and loving the little children.

The true nature of the question at issue in the whole controversy, ancient and modern, with respect to the literary merits of Euripides, cannot, I think, be better expressed