From The Contemporary Review. EURIPIDES AS A RELIGIOUS TEACHER.

ing awe. For both life with its infinite sorrows is greater than art. In this respect they differ from Sophocles, by whom they are naturally separated. Sophocles is not the poet as prophet, but the poet as artist. For him all that is most solemn, or terrible, or beautiful in human experi

work. He shows the perfection of calm, conscious mastery over the subjects with which he deals, but he does not speak to us himself. He has no message, no questionings, no convictions, beyond such utterances as harmoniously complete the consummate symmetry of his poems. It is otherwise with Eschylus and Euripides. Both are deeply moved and show that they are deeply moved, by religious feeling, as a spiritual and not an æsthetic force. But the feeling in the two cases is widely different.

AMONG the services which Browning has rendered to literature, not the least conspicuous in his interpretation of Euripides. In "Balaustion's Adventure" and "Aristophanes' Apology," he has not only given a poet's rendering of two charac-ence becomes simply an element in his teristic plays, the "Alcestis" and the "Phrenzied Hercules," but he has given the student sympathetic guidance to their deeper meaning. He has enabled English readers to estimate at their true worth the criticism of A. W. Schlegel, and at the same time he has opened a striking view of speculations and desires which found a place in the mind of a great Athenian when Athens was greatest. Euripides is indeed the true representative of democratic Athens. He was of honorable descent, and had enjoyed the discipline of most varied culture. Gymnast, artist, and student, he had made trial of Eschylus is the exponent of the old all that the city had to teach; and as hold- faith of Greece - stern, simple, resolute, ing a sacred office in the service of Apollo strong in self-restraint. Euripides, on the he had an inheritance from older religious other hand, has to take account of all feeling. It may almost be said that Eurip- the novel influences under which he had ides lived and died with the Athens which grown up; the speculations of Ionian philhas moved the world. His lifetime in-osophy, the larger relations of national cluded the highest development of Athe- intercourse, the force of a new domestic nian art and literature, the rise and the life. Once again Asia had touched Eufall of Athenian supremacy. He was born rope and quickened there new powers.. on the day of Salamis (480 B.C.). He pro- Greece had conquered Persia only that duced his "Medea" in the first year of she might better receive from the East the Peloponnesian War (431 B.C.). His the inspiration of a wider energy. "Trojan Women" was exhibited in the year of the expedition to Sicily and the recall of Alcibiades (415 B.C.). He died in 406 B.C., the year before Ægospotamos. He belonged wholly to the new order which is represented by the age of Pericles. Though he was only a generation younger than Eschylus, his works, when compared with those of his predecessor, represent the results of a revolution both in art and in thought.

But however different Eschylus and Euripides are in their views of existence, and in their treatment of life upon the stage, they are alike interesting to the student of the history of religious thought. Both speak with deep personal feeling. Both offer a partial interpretation of mysteries which fill them with an overwhelm

At the same time the political circumstances under which Euripides wrote helped to intensify the thoughts which were stirred by the teachings of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras. The glorious strug gle of the Persian War, in which Æschylus had taken part, with its apparently plain and decisive issue, was followed by results widely different from that final triumph; and Euripides had to witness the long horrors of civil conflict, the shaking of the popular creed under unexpected disasters, paroxysms of popular fanaticism, the moral dissolution of the plague. He felt the grievous turmoil of opinion and action, and he reflected it. His constitution fitted him for his work. He was by nature inclined to ponder the problems of life and not to enter upon affairs. He

was a student of men in books as well as

I.

in society; and the popular tradition which IN order to understand the treatment assigns to Anaxagoras a decisive influ- of the popular mythology by Euripides, ence over his view of the world may cer- we must bear in mind the place which tainly be accepted as true; though nothing was occupied by the Homeric poems in is less likely than that he was diverted contemporary Greek education. It is not from philosophy to the stage by the fate too much to say that these were (if the of his master. For Euripides is essen- phrase may be allowed) a kind of Greek tially a poet, and not a speculator. He Bible. Every Athenian was familiar with deals with the mysteries of being from the their contents; they furnished the general side of feeling rather than of thought. A view of the relations of gods and men, of passionate fulness of human interest is the seen and the unseen, which formed a the characteristic mark of his writings, fixed background to the common prospect and the secret of his power. He touched of life. This being so they produced the the common heart because he recognized impression that the divine forces correthe different phases of its ordinary sor-sponded with human forces, differing only rows and temptations and strivings. in intensity and range. The gods were

The brusque lines of Philemon are a held to be of like passions with men, but unique testimony to his personal attrac-stronger and wiser, with the vigor of tiveness:

Though it is impossible to use isolated expressions

of the characters of a dramatist as evidence of his own belief, the general convergence of their opinions may be fairly taken as giving his judgment from various points of sight. In the endeavor to obtain a just view of the teaching of Euripides on the line of subjects mentioned above, I wrote out every passage in his extant plays and fragments which seemed to bear upon them, and the reader will judge how far they combine to give an intelligible result.

The references are given throughout to the edition of Nauck in Teubner's "Bibliotheca." The translations are sufficiently close, I hope, to enable the scholar to recall the original words at once, and at the same

time, to convey the meaning faithfully to the English

reader.

undecaying energy. Such a conception affords an adequate basis for the ordinary duties of worship, and was not superficially at variance with morality. But more careful reflection showed that the beings of the Homeric Olympus failed to satisfy the ideal of spiritual sovereigns; that a mere increase in the scale of human qualities could not supply a stable foundation for reverence; that the worshipper must look beyond this crowd of conflicting deities if he was to find an object on which he could rest with supreme trust.

Such difficulties had not received a clear expression in the time of Æschylus, nor would he have been disposed to deal with them. The wants and sorrows of men vanish in his sight before the awful majesty of an inscrutable divine purpose. With Euripides the case was different: man, and not destiny, was the central subject of his art. His Orestes, for example, is not the instrument of a divine will, prompted, tortured, delivered by external powers, but a son racked with Hamlet-like misgivings, and finding within himself the justification and the punishment of his deed. Euripides, in other words, regarded the human and the divine as factors in life, alike real and permanent. He aimed at dealing with the whole sum of our present experience. He was therefore constrained to bring the popular creed in some way into harmony with absolute right and truth; to give a moral

belonging to man's nature. But a greater difficulty lies behind. The appearance of injustice is harder to endure than darkness, and Euripides dwells with sorrowful persistence on the moral inequalities of life. He finds in this the sorest trial of faith. The passionate exclamation of Bellerophon,

interpretation to current legends; to show | ignorance may be borne with patience as that life, even as we see it, offers ground for calm trust on which man may at least venture to rest. Plato banished poets from his ideal republic on account of the moral difficulties raised by their representations of divine things. Euripides endeavored to find a more practical remedy for an evil which he could not but feel: he sought to penetrate through the words and figures of the traditional teaching which the poets adopted to the truths which lay beneath, and so to preserve the symbols of primitive belief without doing

violence to moral instinct.

In attempting to fulfil this work, Euripides frankly acknowledges its difficulty. All investigation of the divine is, he lays down, necessarily beset by difficulty. This difficulty is increased by a superficial view of the course of human affairs. It is made insoluble by the literal acceptance of the details of mythology.

Under various circumstances Euripides makes his characters affirm the mysteriousness of the questions involved in theology. They may not either be dealt with or set aside lightly. The poet refuses to acquiesce in those perfunctory utterances of professional diviners in which many found relief:

Why do ye, seated at oracular shrines,

Swear that ye know the secrets of the gods?
Men have no power to fashion such replies :
For he that boasts he knows about the gods,
Knows only this, the art to win belief.*
There is a complexity, a manifoldness, in
the vicissitudes of providential govern-
ment which at once arrests human atten-

'Tis said by some that there are gods in heaven.
There are not, are not; if men will not still,
Bound by their folly, use the old wives' tale.
Nay, look yourselves,*

finds frequent echoes in his plays. So it
is that the herald Talthybius, looking at
the prostrate form of Hecuba, exclaims:
Zeus, shall I say that thou regardest men?
Or that we hold in vain this false belief,
Thinking there is indeed a race of gods,
While fortune sways all human destinies ? †
And this apparent miscarriage of justice
is as great negatively as positively. The
failure of virtue to gain recognition is not
less perplexing than undeserved suffering.
For-

If the gods, to man's degree,

Had wit and wisdom, they would bring
Mankind a twofold youth, to be
Their virtue's sign-mark, all should see,
In those with whom life's winter thus grew
spring.

For when they died, into the sun once more,
Would they have traversed twice life's race-
course o'er ;

Eu

While ignobility had simply run
Existence through, nor second life begun.‡
A final difficulty lies in the letter of the
divine legends. According to these, the
gods act as no good man would act.
ripides meets the difficulty boldly. He
affirms consistently that the legends about
the gods, which tend to confuse human
intuitions of right and wrong, of truth
and duty, are not literally true. When
Heracles recovered from his phrensy, and
looked upon his murdered wife and chil
dren in bitterest sorrow and shame, The-
seus sought to bring him comfort by
recalling facts from the popular mythol-
ogy; but Heracles rejects the consolation
and replies:-

Beller. fr. 288. Comp. fr. 892, 893; Scyr. fr. 185.
Contrast fr. 981.
↑ Hec. 488.

Herc. Fur. 635 (Browning).

Have I judged worthy faith, at any time;
Nor shall I be persuaded one is born

Hecuba, addressing Helen, gives a striking interpretation of the "judgment of Paris." It was no contest of actual deities, but of conflicting passions. Aphrodite herself could have moved Helen and

His fellows' master! since God stands in Amycle to Troy without leaving heaven.

need

Just is her punishment, but not thy deed;
And Phoebus, Phoebus - well, he is my king;
I am dumb: though wise, not wise he spake to
thee.§

And the messenger who relates the death
of Neoptolemus at Delphi concludes: -

But the Aphrodite who came with Paris and carried off the bride of Menelaus was the feeling which Paris stirred in Helen's breast.*

But while Euripides here finds in the soul itself the powers which man is tempted to place wholly without, it does not follow that he denies the objective existence of beings corresponding to hu man passions. On the contrary, he seems to recognize a correspondence between human feelings and impulses and superties were representatives. The origin of natural forces, of which the Olympian deithat which is extraordinary is referred to divine agency. Death and madness are real powers external to man. Strife and derive their force from something without ambition, hope, justice, and persuasion,

which is akin to them. From time to time men move in a mysterious intercourse with spiritual beings. Hippolytus in his first joy can say to Artemis:

But

I feel thee near, and answer thee in word Hearing thy voice, yet seeing not thy face. It is not then surprising that imperfecSo did he [Apollo] to Achilles' son, tions should be found in beings which, Who offered retribution; he the king, even when they are felt to be most presWho giveth oracles to other men, ent and energetic, are essentially limited The judge of righteousness to all the world, and human in their characteristics. And bore in mind, like a malicious churl, Old grudges; how could such a one be wise ! they can bring no repose or confidence to the soul. The poet as a religious teacher Here, then, Euripides is directly at must look beyond himself, beyond the issue with much of the popular faith. many gods - those colossal human figHow, it may be asked, can such language, ures, symbols or sources of man's conwidely different from the reckless banter-flicting passions - for that which gives ings of Aristophanes, be reconciled with unity to the view of existence. § And due respect, for the divine? The answer seems to lie in the fact that Euripides draws a clear distinction between the Olympian gods and the one Being to whom they also minister. He was in clined to treat the Olympian gods as in some sense personifications or embodiments of human attributes. It is said that Anaxagoras interpreted the Homeric stories as symbolic. and his scholar sought in the same line a worthy meaning for the current mythology. In this sense

here it is that the "theology" of Euripides becomes of the highest interest. Philosophers had sought the principle of unity in some primal element; Euripides, though his language is naturally vague, seems rather to seek it in a vital force, which slowly differentiates and moulds all things. The force is distinct from the matter through which it is manifested. Human thought is incompetent to define

⚫ Troad. 969 ff.

↑ Hel. 1002; Antig. fr. 170; Iph. Aul. 392; Phoen. 798; 531. Compare Hel 560; Iph. Aul. 973. Hippol. 85. Compare Ibid. 1391.

The famous line with which the Melanippe origi nally opened obviously pointed to the Zeus of mythology, as different from the supreme Sovereign:

"Zeus, whosoe'er Zeus is, for by report
I know him only" (Fragm. 483).

Compare Herc. Fur. 1263.