Euripedes
from The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton
EURIPIDES "with all his faults the most tragic of the poets," said
Aristotle, supreme among critics, whose claim to pronounce ever the final
verdict has only of late been called into question. His judgment here
points the latter-day attitude toward him: the great critic was wrong; he
confused sadness and tragedy. Euripides is the saddest of the poets and
for that very reason not the most tragic. A very great tragedian, beyond
all question, one of the world's four greatest, to all of whom belongs
that strangest power, so to present the spectacle of pain that we are
lifted to what we truly call the height of tragedy.
Euripides can indeed walk "those heights exalted" but the dark depths of
pain are what he knows best. He is "the poet of the world's grief." He
feels, as no other writer has felt, the pitifulness of human life, as of
children suffering helplessly what they do not know and can never
understand. No poet's ear has ever been so sensitively attuned as his to
the still, sad music of humanity, a strain little heeded by that world of
long ago. And together with that, something then even more unheeded, the
sense of the value of each individual human being. He alone of all the
classic world so felt. It is an amazing phenomenon. Out of the pages
written more than twenty-three hundred years ago sound the two notes
which we feel are the dominants in our world to-day, sympathy with
suffering and the conviction of the worth of everyone alive. A poet of
the antique world speaks to us and we hear what seems peculiarly our
own.
There is an order of mind which is perpetually modern. All those
possessed of it are akin, no matter how great the lapse of time that
separates them. When Professor Murray's translations made Euripides
popular in the early years of this century, what impressed people first
of all was his astonishing modernity: he seemed to be speaking the very
accent of l900. Today another generation who have little care for the
brightest stars of those years, George Meredith, Henry James, any or all
of the great later Victorians, read Euripides as belonging to them. So
the younger generation in 400 B.C. felt, and so will they feel in many a
century to come. Always those in the vanguard of their time find in
Euripides an expression of their own spirit. He is the great exponent of
the forever recurring modern mind.
This spirit, always in the world and always the same, is primarily a
destructive spirit, critical not creative. "The life without criticism,"
Plato says, "is not worthy to be lived." The modern minds in each
generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world, who
will not leave us to walk undisturbed in the ways of our fathers. The
established order is always wrong to them. But there is criticism and
criticism. Cynical criticism is totally opposed to the temper of the
modern mind. The wise king who looked upon all the works that his hands
had wrought and on all the labor that he had labored to do, and beheld
that all was vanity and vexation of spirit, was not a modern mind. To
read Ecclesiastes is to feel, "This is what men have always thought at
times and will always think"; it never carries the conviction, "This,
just this is modern. It is the new note of to-day." The same is true of
Voltaire, that other wisest man and greatest critic, whose mighty pen
shook the old unhappy things of his day until their foundations gave way.
He is not a modern mind. His attitude, given in brief by his "Je ne sais
pas ce que c'est que la vie Čternelle, mais celle-ci est une mauvaise
plaisanterie" [I don't know about the eternal life, but this one here is
a bad joke] is of another order. His is the critical intellect, directed
upon human affairs but quite separated from "the human heart all ages
live by," and that is a separation the modern-minded know nothing of.
Above all, they care for human life and human things and can never stand
aloof from them. They suffer for mankind, and what preoccupies them is
the problem of pain. They are peculiarly sensitized to "the giant agony
of the world." What they see as needless misery around them and what they
envisage as needless misery to come is intolerable to them. The world to
them is made up of individuals, each with a terrible power to suffer, and
the poignant pity of their own hearts precludes them from any philosophy
in the face of this awful sum of pain and any capacity to detach
themselves from it. They behold, first and foremost, that most sorrowful
thing on earth, injustice, and they are driven by it to a passion of
revolt. Convention, so often a mask for injustice, they will have none
of; in their pursuit of justice at any cost they tear away veils that
hide hateful things; they call into question all pleasant and comfortable
things. They are not of those who take "all life as their province"; what
is good in the age they live in they do not regard; their eyes are fixed
upon what is wrong. And yet they never despair. They are rebels,
fighters. They will never accept defeat. It is this fact that gives them
their profound influence, the fact that they who see so deep into wrong
and misery and feel them so intolerable, never conclude the defeat of the
mind of man.
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He [Euripedes] was, the stories that have come down about him say, an
unhappy man. He withdrew from the world and lived the life of a recluse
in his library; "gloomy, unsmiling, averse to society," duns an ancient
description of him. A misanthrope, they said, who preferred books to men.
Never was a judgment less true. He fled from the world of men because he
cared for men too much. He could not bear the poignant pity of his own
heart. His life had fallen on unhappy times. As final defeat drew ever
nearer, Athens grew terrified, fierce, cruel. And Euripides had a double
burden to carry, the sensitiveness of a great poet and the aching pity of
a modern mind. How could such a one endure to come into contact with what
his city had learned to tolerate and to commend? One thing alone to help
her he had been fitted to do: he could so write as to show the
hideousness of cruelty and men's fierce passions, and the piteousness of
suffering, weak, and wicked human beings, and move men thereby to the
compassion which they were learning to forget.
On these two scores it is easy to explain what at first sight seems
puzzling, his great unpopularity in his lifetime and his unexampled
popularity shortly after his death. Only five of his plays were awarded a
first prize, whereas Sophocles gained over twenty. Aristophanes has good
words for Aeschylus and higher praise for Sophocles but nothing is too
bad for him to say about Euripides. The modern mind is never popular in
its own day. People hate being made to think, above all upon fundamental
problems. Sophocles touched with the radiant glory of sublime poetry the
figures of the ancient gods, and the Athenians went home from his plays
with the pleasing conviction that old things were right. But Euripides
was the arch-heretic, miserably disturbing, never willing to leave a man
comfortably ensconced in his favorite convictions and prejudices. Prizes
were not for such as he. And yet, very soon after his death, the verdict
swung far to the other side and extraordinary tales of the way he was
loved by all manner of men have come down to us.
The dogmatisms of each age wear out. Statements of absolute truth grow
thin, show gaps, are discarded. The heterodoxy of one generation is the
orthodoxy of the next. The ultimate critique of pure reason is that its
results do not endure. Euripides' assaults upon the superstructure of
religion were forgotten; what men remembered and came to him for was the
pitying understanding of their own suffering selves in a strange world of
pain, and the courage to tear down old wrongs and never give up seeking
for new things that should be good. And generation after generation since
have placed him securely with those very few great artists
Who feel the giant agony of the world,
And more, like slaves to poor humanity,
Labor for mortal good . . .