Littell's Living Age/Volume 159/Issue 2055/The Writings of Euripides

Leaving Euripides as a man and a thinker, we may pass for a moment to his art, which we perceive to be but the flower of his philosophy. His discursive and contemplative spirit, enamored of reality, did not even attempt to soar to the Titanic world of Æschylus. As little could his quick-changing conceptions lend themselves to the gradual evolution, the nice gradations of Sophocles' art. His plots are often careless and unequal. Far from evolving his story, he is fain to make it known beforehand to the audience by means of a prologue. His choruses, beautiful as they lyrically are, are often disconnected from the main theme. Too negligent of unity, he seeks rather to move by scene or situation or incident, by the presentation of human life in its thousandfold variety. His language itself is not involved or subtle, but that of every-day life. Philosophic in his method, his philosophy further asserts itself in his prominent and peculiar characteristics. To the thoughtful observer human life must necessarily appear at first sight sad, and Euripides is the master of pathos. No poet ever drew more tears. With ready imaginative sympathy he has felt deeply the vicissitudes of the human lot, approached it under all its varying conditions. His touch lays bare the beatings of the human heart, and strikes the chord of every passion and affection. And life has other aspects for him too. His attentive eye has caught the color, the variety of the outward moving panorama of men and things; has turned aside to dwell with loving appreciation on the beauty of external nature, and the picturesqueness of both has passed into his verse. But he has not stopped short even here. Looking with visionary eyes on the things of reality, he has informed them with a new spirit, and blended truth with fancy in themes of the most romantic interest. Nor are the grace and brilliancy of his imagination less striking than the homeliness and pathos of his dramatic conception. It is his pathos, his romance, his picturesqueness that make Euripides the most modern of the ancients. In his variety, his free flow of fancy, his careless prodigality of treatment, there is discernible something of that "wood-note wild," that "naturalness" which is the distinguishing trait of Shakespeare. To further the resemblance there are not wanting indications that the genius of Euripides also had its humorous side.