passion was a heaven-sent malady, against which she struggled with all the force of her nature, and which she proposed to escape by death had not her secret been extracted from her, and had she not then been seduced by the complaisance and want of principle of her aged nurse. The Greeks believed in the direct interference of the goddess Aphrodite, and on no phase of human nature is their poetry more copious and more striking than on her absolute power to instil the best minds with wild madness.[1] Phædra is therefore in no sense an abandoned woman, or a low character ceding to her ordinary passions, as a modern reader might at first sight suppose, but a noble and pure woman afflicted with a horrible madness, over which she in vain strives to obtain control. What is, however, though equally Greek, not so reconcilable with our ideas of a noble nature, is her dying vengeance by bequeathing to her husband a false accusation against Hippolytus. Euripides no doubt found it in the legend, and to him, and to his age, the taking of vengeance on an enemy by treacherous means was not only natural but lawful. To us it is not so, and hence modern copies of the play have commonly softened or altered this feature.
It is to be observed that nowhere does Euripides conceive a man afflicted with such a visitation, which would, I fancy, have seemed quite unnatural or absurd to an Athenian audience. Furthermore, this great painter of the passion of love never dreamt of composing a love-scene, which would probably have been considered indelicate. So different are the tastes of equally civilised societies! The nearest approach to such a scene is the recognition of Menelaus and Helen (in the Helena), where a long-separated husband and wife meet and embrace with transports of joy. Such a love-scene in a modern play—say at the court of Louis XIV.—would have excited transports of merri-
- ↑ Perhaps the modern censors of the great and good men, who have had their lives marred by errors of this kind, are wrong in underrating this demonic folly in human affairs.
