'LAST SCENE OF ALL '.
(PHOENISSAE.)
The purpose of the investigations, which we have pursued in this volume, has been to throw some light on the strange and unparalleled perplexity of Euripidean art, as proceeding apparently, without harmony and without discrimination, upon contradictory hypotheses. On the one hand we have the fact that prima facie his plays, like those of his two great rivals, seem to be illustrations of sacred legends, in which the gods and miracles of anthropomorphic religion are assumed, at least for artistic purposes, as truth, forming the machinery of the story, giving the conclusion to which it points, and controlling the sentiment which it raises. On the other hand we have the equally visible fact that the plays are full of incidents and language pointing directly to the opposite conclusion, stimulating an adverse sentiment, consistent only with disbelief in the traditional religion and rejection of the anthropomorphic gods. The result is a confusion, a want of unity, which, if accepted as the final base for a judgment of the author, degrades him at once to a level of thought and feeling altogether below that of his alleged compeers, and indeed below that of the ordinary practitioner in literary fiction, thus causing us, if we consider the matter clearly, to wonder how his contemporaries, and still more the generations which immediately followed his death, can have entered, as they certainly did, into the delusion that this was an artist worthy of the very highest rank. The answer which we have offered is briefly, that of the two conflicting elements one is real and one pretence. The rationalism is genuine fiction, if we may use this term for convenience; the orthodoxy is pretended fiction, a
