CHAPTER X.
THE HISTORY AND FORTUNES OF HIS WORKS.
105. I have already explained (above, p. 37) how the small number of Euripides' tragic victories is to be reconciled with his undoubted and immediate popularity. For it required no study of generations, no growth of new light and learning, to comprehend the clear and pointed utterances of the poet. He was recognised as a master of style even by Aristophanes, and we may thank Euripides, together with the orator Lysias, for overthrowing the hard crabbed conciseness of writing which we see in Thucydides and Antiphon, and which often mars even the dialogue of Sophocles. We know that the dithyrambic poets, on the other hand, indulged in such exuberance as was destructive of all clearness of thought and chastity of taste, and to this also the deep clear stream of his lyrical diction was the best antidote. For he purged his vocabulary of all obscure and recondite terms; and while the mediæval lexicons are full of such rare and uncouth words from the works of Sophocles, hardly a single stranger to the purest Attic speech can be brought home to our poet. But in other respects, we may see traces of admiration and even of imitation of our poet in Sophocles' later work.
106. In Aristophanes, with the exception of a single remark praising the smoothness of Euripides' diction, which is corroborated by a taunt of plagiarism from a rival comedian, we have nothing but the bitterest and most uncompromising hostility. If the tragedies of Euripides had been lost, we should have believed his opponent, that he was a degrader of his art, a panderer to the lowest taste for excitement in the mass of the people; that he sought to gain popularity by degrading gods and heroes, by detracting from ancient virtues, and setting up idle casuistry and flippant immorality in their place. We should have believed him the poet of the mob, the mouthpiece of the sophists on the stage, the corrupter of public morals and of public decency; and all this is put with such audacious assurance, and seasoned with such brilliant wit, that there are yet German students who profess to believe it.
The attacks of the comic poet are to be found in three of his plays, the Acharnians, the Thesmophoriazusæ, and the Frogs. In the first, an early play, he ridicules the ragged heroes so frequent in Euripides, and represents a man in distress going to seek Euripides, and borrow from him a pathetic garb of woe to soften the hearts of his judges. Euripides is represented as a recluse student, sitting in his study surrounded by his "properties," which consist of suits of rags which vie with one another in squalor. In the Thesmophoriazusæ, Euripides is first ridiculed as a woman-hater, whom the women in council are determined to punish. The poet is represented as dressing up a friend in woman's attire to attend their deliberations. In the sequel the various stage devices in his plays are parodied, not without suggestion of his immorality. From the scholia explaining this piece, we have many valuable quotations of lost plays of Euripides, such as the Antiope. In the Frogs, the most complete and systematic of all Aristophanes' attacks, the poet's whole moral and social tendencies are discussed in contrast to the tone of Æschylus, and he is represented as the mouthpiece of the vulgar and depraved mob, that ochlocracy which the Germans dislike so much. Thus we may say that no Greek poet ever received more constant and unsparing adverse criticism, and from the ablest possible critic. To have outlived, nay, to have conquered such attacks, is in my mind an astonishing proof of genius.
The caricatures of Aristophanes have this foundation, that our poet in his pictures of passion did not shrink from painful subjects; but have we no Œdipus and Thyestes in Sophocles? Morever, in his dramatic statements of intellectual difficulties of faith and dogma, he did not shrink from speaking the most daring heresies from the stage; but was it more disturbing than Aristophanes' own theological buffoonery? Such was no doubt the judgment of the Athenians, when the poet's political ambiguities were forgotten, and when they awarded to his posthumous plays the highest prize, in reply to the savage attack upon his memory in the Frogs of Aristophanes.
107. We have hardly a word of information about dramatic performances elsewhere than at Athens, but that the appreciation of the great tragic masterpieces must have been diffused all over Hellenic lands, is proved first, by the activity of Æschylus in Sicily, and of Euripides in Northern Greece; secondly, by the frequent and imposing remains of theatres on the same model as that of Athens, and which the traveller may yet find in the Peloponnesus, and in Asia Minor. Lastly, we hear so much of the popularity of actors over Greece, and even of their liberties in tampering with the great texts, that we may assume them to have been an important travelling profession, and to have gone about, like our comedians, "starring it" in the provinces.
108. In the following generation, we find Plato quoting Euripides more frequently than he quotes the older tragedians, though he records a distinct preference for Sophocles. In the orators, our poet is cited not only as an acknowledged master, but as a noble and patriotic citizen. The philosophers, and among them Aristotle, naturally found more to quote in Euripides than in other poets, but so far as we can trust the Poetics, Sophocles was still considered by the theorists the model of tragedy, and many faults of economy are found with Euripides, though he is called the most tragic of poets, and perpetually cited as a great and acknowledged model. But Attic society in the days of Alexander seems to have studied and loved him more than the rest, for in the genteel comedy of Diphilus and Menander, which reflects the tastes of the age, his influence saturated every page. The recognitions in his plays became the fixed models for the new comedies, and his style was so accurately copied, that the stray fragments of Menander can hardly be distinguished from those of Euripides. He was in fact the poetical idol of an age which studied to draw pictures of ordinary human nature, and here found them of inimitable grace and wonderful variety, expressed with the clearness of the purest Attic diction.
109. Thus he passed with the conquests of Alexander into the East, and with the rise of Alexandria into the treasures of the Museum. He was then commented on as one of the three masters of Attic tragedy, and it is to the collection of didascaliæ of Aristophanes (of Byzantium) that we owe the occasional scanty but valuable notices in the Greek arguments and scholia on the date, success, and rivals of the several plays. For the didascaliæ were contemporary records—many on votive tripods—of each performance at Athens, which noted the author, date, companion plays and success in each year's competitions. Had the complete transcript of this Aristophanes' work remained, it would have thrown a flood of light on the external history of the tragedies, and saved our scholars volumes of speculation. But these simple and valuable notices, to which are added a good many grammatical and explanatory notes, are handed down to us together with artistic criticisms, which, if they date from the Alexandrian age,[1] show a complete and ridiculous absence of all æsthetical judgment. Why, they ask, does Electra sit watching at Orestes' feet, when she ought rather to sit at his head? Medea, they say, abandons her character when she laments over the children she is about to slay. Iphigenia, they object, who enters as a weeping and tender maiden, ought not to become a heroine in courage and resolution as the play proceeds. Such were the hands into which Euripides passed from the loving appreciation of refined Athens.
110. But while these pedants were staining his pages with the mildew of their criticism, he was delighting the semi-Hellenised courts of the far East in their relaxations, and he was teaching the conquerors of the West to transfer him in a new language to their tamer stage. Andronicus, Nævius, Ennius translated many Greek plays, and Ennius did so chiefly from Euripides. The versions of Ennius, who brought out at least a dozen Euripidean plays, must have been as free as those of Racine, and like them, without a regular chorus. Pacuvius and Attius translated Greek plays likewise, though less exclusively from our poet; while we hear that after a banquet at the Parthian court, scenes from the Bacchæ were being recited, when the actor seized the gory head of Crassus, which had just been brought in, and gave a horrible realism to the affecting scene where the frantic mother parades the head of Pentheus in triumph, and with returning consciousness discovers that she has mangled her own son.
The rivals of the unfortunate Crassus at Rome were doubtless able to quote the text, when they heard the striking news, for Cæsar, we are told, constantly had lines of the Phœnissæ in his mouth, and Cicero often refers to Euripides, whom he judges not inferior to his great contemporaries, though all three differed so widely in style. Indeed the fashion of composing free versions of the tragedies without any intention of producing them on the stage, seems a perpetual amusement among literary Romans. But Ovid's, and even Mæcenas' reputed attempts at a Latin Medea, seem to show that the more cosmopolitan poet, as we might expect, was the best appreciated. The fourth book of the Æneid reflects a like interest in this wild picture of female passion.
111. The later Latin tragedies, handed down to us under the name of Seneca, show the same respect for Euripides as a tragic model, but the false taste of an artificial age adorned his purity with showy tinsel, and exaggerated his pathos with extravagant bombast. One great scene (in the Latin Troades), which we cannot identify, leaves us in doubt whether the Roman has followed some forgotten Greek model or struck out one fresh spark of genius amid the lurid glow of his diseased taste. But while this tragic school could not remain satisfied with his simplicity, the sober Quintilian warns every orator to study so admirable a master of persuasion. The so-called Longinus often quotes him for sublimity, and thus at the end of the classical days he is praised for the very qualities which he despised, at the risk of obloquy and of defeat. In the last days of the old world, the wretched days of centos, the unknown author of the Christus Patiens made up his poem on the death of Christ chiefly from the Bacchæ of Euripides—a strange but not unsuggestive borrowing, had the author sounded deeper than the mere words that suited his purpose.
112. We pass beyond the age of adaptation and imitation to that in which Euripides became an author of the study, or a handbook of education, and when his works came to struggle, not with too great celebrity and diffusion—a fruitful cause of corruption—but with the dangers of neglect and ignorance, of false transcription, of forgetfulness, and of decay. In the earlier Byzantine empire, indeed, a selection of his plays was diligently read and annotated for school use; but the selection seems gradually to have grown smaller and smaller, so that when we emerge from the Dark Ages into the Revival, we have only two MSS. (C and P) copied from a single book containing eighteen plays, and neither of them complete; thus for several—Hercules, Helena, Electra—we have but one MS. authority, for others only two. A selection of nine plays is more frequently met, and in older copies; while of these again, seven, five, and three were variously selected; the last—Hecuba, Orestes, Phœnissæ—accordingly more copiously annotated and better preserved than the rest. Thus a large part of our treasure is not due to the greater popularity of Euripides, though such was probably the Byzantine opinion, but to the mere accident of the Florentine C and the Palatine P being preserved.
113. The first Greek tragedies printed were four plays of Euripides, in capital letters, at Venice, in 1494; an experiment attempted with only four other books, of which the Anthologia is the only one common in our libraries. An edition, in 1503, of all the plays (except the Elcctra, printed 1545), by Aldus, is the proper princeps; so that to Euripides (except the four plays) was never vouchsafed the honour, as to Homer and Isocrates, of being published in the fine old characters which disappeared before the far inferior types of Aldus. But still he kept in advance of the other tragic poets. In 1518, when Æschylus was being first printed, Erasmus already published a Latin verse translation of two plays (Hecuba, Iphigenia in Aulis), and, what was far more significant, about 1540, Ludovico Dolce began to adapt them for the Italian stage. Of his versions four are still accessible, the Thieste, the Hecuba (hardly altered), the Ifigenia (in Aulis), and Giocasta (considerably modified). Buchanan produced an elegant and faithful Latin Alcestis and Medea about 1570.
114. But the Giocasta (Phœnissæ) of Dolce is to us far more interesting, inasmuch as the Iocasta of George Gascoigne, Shakspere's predecessor, appeared in 1566, and may have directly suggested a celebrated passage in his Henry IV.[2] Gascoigne's Iocasta, though professedly translated by him and Francis Kinwelmersh from Euripides, differs widely from the Phœnissæ, being a literal, though unacknowledged, rendering of Dolce's version. And it should also be noted that the speech of Eteocles, which Shakspere seems to have used, was cited in Plutarch's tract "On Brotherly Love," of which Amyot's translation was certainly accessible to the poet. In either case the passage is of considerable interest, as being (I suppose) the only instance of even indirect contact between Shakspere and the tragedies of Euripides. Indeed the idea is so general and so natural to a poet, that it may well have occurred independently to Shakspere. But the reverse seems the opinion of learned commentators, beginning with Warburton.
We hear that a Troades was printed in Greek by J. Daly as early as 1575. But the numerous Euripidean titles which appear in plays ranging from 1559 tfo 1581, some by Heywood, some by Studley, and others, refer rather to versions of Seneca's plays, which then exercised a great influence on the English stage.
115. In France, as might be expected, the example of Dolce was early emulated; there were translations of four Euripidean plays by Lazare and I. A. Baif, and by Sibillet,[3] in the earlier part of the sixteenth century; and even Amyot occupied his youth with poetic versions of Greek plays, which were never published. So also in the nascent drama, we find many free versions, in treatment like those of Seneca, omitting and adding according to the taste of the age. In this movement Euripides seems (after the example of Dolce) to have been preferred to the older and stricter models. There were also the operas of Quinault, of which two at least, an Alcestis and a Theseus (Medea), were from Euripides; but which, as Voltaire well observes, while copying the externals of singing and of a chorus from the Greek plays, injured the true appreciation of them by bringing the musical part into such prominence that the real tragedy was neglected, and even the actor lost in the singer.
116. This brings us up to Rotrou and to the great Corneille—authors who hardly knew the difference between one classic model and another, and thought Seneca as great a poet as Euripides, perhaps indeed assumed him to be a literal translator. Thus it was through Seneca, and through modern versions like Dolce's, that Euripides told at first upon the drama of Europe. Indeed had Corneille been able to study the great originals, he would not have felt himself contesting in unequal conflict against the hostile theorists let loose upon him by Richelieu and the French Academy. These people drew from oblivion Aristotle's Poetics, and proved to him that his Cid was a direct violation of the scientific theory of drama (the unities of time, place, and circumstances, &c.) deduced from the infallible critic of antiquity. Hence, while inferior rivals composed their poor classic tragedies by rule and plummet-line, the great genius was struggling in vain against the yoke which he felt to be unjust, and which the Greek originals, especially Euripides', would have shown him to have been historically as well as æsthetically absurd. Do we not almost hear Euripides speaking in the preface to the Don Sancho, in which Corneille ventures on an independent theory of the drama against the essays of such as Chapelain and the Abbé Hedelin, the creatures of Richelieu, and the apes of Aristotle? "Why not," says he, "chausser le cothurne un peu plus bas Surely terror and pity, these essentials of tragedy, may be more strongly excited in us by the sight of misfortunes happening to persons of our own condition and like us in all respects, than by the sight of those which shake great monarchs upon their thrones, and which are quite foreign to us." But he dared not solve the problem as Euripides did, by bringing down the kings to the common level in language and in feelings.
117. Racine, coming next, had the learning but not the genius to give the true solution. He read and followed the Greek masters, especially Euripides, with full knowledge of the language, but he gave his adhesion from the first to the theorists. His famous transcripts from Euripides, the Phèdre and the Iphigénie, with all their genius, modify the essential features of the old poet's work, because they did not suit the rules of the pedants and the manners of the court. The cry of terror in Iphigenia, the motherly independence of Clytemnestra, the vindictive treachery of Phaedra, are all softened and weakened by ceremonious dignity or by Christian morality. Above all, the notion of a play without declarations and intrigues of love was intolerable, and so secondary characters are created to love or be loved by Hippolytus and Achilles, and withal paragons of virtue or scapegoats of crime.
Racine's many and often successful rivals, such as Pradon, developed no new principles. But in his latest works, the Esther and the Athalie, we feel that though he does not copy, he imitates Euripides with deeper sympathy, and his Joas is the finest modern parallel to the purity and the freshness of Ion.
118. This remarkable movement failed to excite any immediate response in England, owing to the political excitement of the times, and the Puritan antipathy to the drama. Nevertheless, the two works which concern Euripides before the close of the period are perhaps more faithful and valuable than all the French imitations put together. The first great edition of the poet's text, the work of Joshua Barnes, did not issue from Cambridge till 1694. The Samson Agonistes of Milton (1674), though its main figure reminds us of the Œdipus Coloneus of Sophocles, yet shows us in every page the author's predilection for Euripides. Nor is this preference shown in his play only. Critics have justly pointed to the description of the two brothers in Comus (vv. 297 sqq.) as borrowed from the herd's description of Orestes and Pylades in the Tauric Iphigenia (vv. 264 sqq.). I cannot find in any of the biographies that Milton was versed in French literature, or influenced by the new triumph of classical tragedy on the French stage; and, indeed, his Samson is a far more faithful and splendid imitation of the Greek models than anything ever done by modern poets. But this performance, if really independent of the French, is the more remarkable, because in his preface Milton evidently censures the school of Shakspere, and reverts to the Greeks as the true models of a drama suited to the sober and respectable classes of society.[4]
119. This great man, however, anticipated a remarkable movement. For with the Restoration, French theories and models began to be studied, and we find for nearly a century a perpetual insisting upon classical theories and an incessant copying of Greek models, often through Latin, still oftener through French, but always professing to follow the great old masters. These copies were not literary pieces like Milton's Samson, but pieces for the stage, which are now forgotten, but which are profoundly interesting in the literary history of the drama. Far the most important exponents of this movement are Addison, whose Cato was hailed by the French as the only really first-rate tragedy ever written in English, and Dryden, whose preface to his version of Troilus and Cressida expounds clearly his full recognition of Shakspere's genius, but his honest criticism of its uncouthness and its want of literary culture. To us this Troilus and Cressida is peculiarly interesting, because Dryden introduced into it the contest of the two brothers, professedly borrowed from the Iphigenia in Aulis of Euripides. I will relegate the lesser names to a note.[5]
120. While these revivals of Euripides were taking place in England, the French had so stereotyped their tragedy according to the model of Racine, that they actually began to test the ancients by the theory drawn from the Poetics, and declare them wanting. A war sprang up between the advocates of the old and the new, and the advocates of the Greek masters began now to defend them by showing that they had sacrificed the unities to greater freedom and the closer study of nature; that in fact they were rather to be compared to the school of Shakspere than to their French imitations; and this has been the course of French dramatic criticism ever since. While we feel that the buskins, and masks, and stereotyped messengers, and balanced discussions, are far too stiff for our stage, French critics are ever defending the irregularities and licences of the Greeks as compared to Racine, and this especially as regards Euripides. The most important and the fairest book during the epoch before us was Brumoy's Théâtre des Grecs (1715), in which he gave either full analyses or translations of most of the plays of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, with a comparison of the treatment of like subjects in each, and in the versions of Dolce, Rotrou, and Racine. This book, which earned Voltaire's sincere praise, is to the present day most instructive and useful, as it regards the Greek tragedy altogether from the theatrical and not the literary point of view. But Brumoy's tone is positively apologetic towards the evidently dominant modern school.
131. Voltaire took up the controversy in a very different spirit. When a youth of eighteen, his taste was turned to the drama by seeing a translation of the Tauric Iphigenia acted at the Duchess of Maine's; this translation being by M, Malespieu, a learned private tutor, who habitually read out to his pupils the Greek plays in French. Voltaire was delighted, and immediately composed his Œdipe; but he afterwards criticised his own work, and brought out an Oreste after Euripides, which he prefaced by his theoretical views.[6] He saw that any literal translation of Greek plays was totally out of the question on the modern stage, and that they must be re-written. Nevertheless he remarks, as Racine had done, that in the new versions, those parts had always been the most effective which were borrowed directly from the originals. This led him to censure severely the love-intrigues introduced in the French tragedies, which he described as "une coquetterie continuelle," "pour complaire au goût le plus fade et le plus faux qui ait jamais corrompu la littérature." Yet he holds firmly to the general type established, though he only admits a furious and criminal passion as a proper tragic subject. As might be expected, he regards Addison's Cato as the most perfect of English tragedies, and censures in the strongest terms the uncouthness of Shakspere, while he speaks enthusiastically of that untutored genius, which, because it was such, founded no school, and provoked no worthy imitators. In this age of Shaksperian enthusiasm the remarks of the great critic are not likely to find much favour.
122. It seems that as the eighteenth century waned, the English attempts at reproducing Frenchified Greek dramas on the stage were gradually discontinued, and Shakspere resumed his sway, together with the genteel comedy of Goldsmith and Sheridan. But the literary study of Euripides himself succeeded. Thus between 1770–90 we have the great Oxford edition of Musgrave, and also the only two complete poetical versions of the poet published in English—Potter's, the more poetical, and Woodhull's, the more learned and minute, inasmuch as he included all the fragments then collected. Critical editions of the plays, such as King's, Monk's, and others, became fashionable, and attained their zenith in Porson's work.
123. In France the most important dramatic revivals were the famous operas of Gluck, the two Iphigenias; for the plays of Voltaire, Crebillon, and their rivals, were after all little better than Seneca's remodelling. But in Italy we have the text and metrical translation, with essays, of all Euripides' plays and fragments, by Carmelli (5 vols. Padua, 1743); an important work and undeservedly forgotten. For a man of rare genius, Alfieri—who took up the drama with a great taste for antiquity, but no knowledge of Greek—turned, late in his career and after he had long abandoned writing, to study the originals, which he had hitherto reached only through French versions. He has recorded to us his enthusiasm and his emotion on reading the real Alcestis (January 17th, 1796); nor could he rest till he had first translated it, and then imitated it in an independent play, the second Alcestis, which he printed, together with the translation, in his works. He seems never to have heard of Carmelli's work.
124. Now at last Germany was entering upon her literary greatness, and with the deeper genius of the nation adopted an independent theory of the drama. The most popular exponent was A. W. Schlegel, who in his Lectures set his face vehemently against the French fixity of theory and practice, and exalted national peculiarities as the proper vehicle for genius. Thus Shakspere was again set on the highest pinnacle of fame; and what was more original, Æschylus was for the first time interpreted with true reverence and understanding. The theories of Aristotle and Horace, in their French copies, were postponed to a proper study of the ancient masters themselves, and a theory of the drama was built on Æschylus and Sophocles. The weak points of Schlegel's criticism were his dislike of the French and depreciation of Euripides. Perhaps on account of Racine's, Voltaire's, and Alfieri's preference, and in opposition to it, every fault was found with Euripides and every merit denied. More especially, the Electra was singled out for ridicule, in comparison with the parallel plays of Æschylus and Sophocles; and in spite of Goethe and of Schiller—the former an imitator of the Tauric, the other a translator of the Aulid Iphigenia—both of them sincere admirers of Euripides, the fashion at last set in against the poet, and the jibes of Aristophanes were exalted into canons of criticism.
125. The present century, while correcting the antipathies of Schlegel's school, has nevertheless not reinstated Euripides completely into his former position. We understand Æschylus at last, and see in him a giant genius, without parallel in the history of Greek literature. We find in Sophocles a more perfect artist, in complete harmony with his materials, and justifying the uniform favour of the Attic public. But many recent editors and historians, and one of our greatest poets, Mr. Browning, have set themselves to assert for Euripides his true and independent position beside these rivals, who have failed to obscure or displace him. The Germans, indeed, still infected by Schlegel, talk of Euripides as the poet of the ochlocracy, that debased democracy which they have invented at Athens after the suggestion of Thucydides. But a sounder art criticism, based upon the results of English and French scholarship, which does not spoil its delicacy and blunt its edge by the weight of erudition, has turned with renewed affection to the sympathetic genius, who delighted the wild Parthian chiefs with his Bacchic revels, who supplied the patient monk with sorrows for his suffering Christ, who witnessed (in truth a very martyr) to truth and nature in the stilted rhetoric of the Roman stage, in the studied pomp of the French court; who fed the youth of Racine and of Voltaire, who revived the slumbering flame of Alfieri's genius, who even in these latter days has occupied great and original poets of many lands—Schiller, Shelley, Alfieri, Browning—with the task of reproducing in their tongues his pathos and his power.
126. I will mention, in conclusion, a few of the best and most accessible helps to the study of the poet.
The best complete texts are those of Kirchhoff, Dindorf (with the fragments), Fix (in Didot's series), and of Mr. Paley (with a full commentary). Editions of select plays are very numerous; among the best, containing several together, are those of King, Porson, Monk, Elmsley, Hermann, Weil; the school editions of single plays are endless. For those not familiar with Greek, I may add that in addition to Potter's and Woodhull's translations of the whole of the works, there are single versions of divers excellence, such as Shelley's Cyclops, Milman's Bacchanals, Fitzgerald's Hippolytus, Browning's Heracles (in Aristophanes' Apology), and Alcestis (paraphrased with comments in Balaustion's Adventure), Schiller's Iphigenia in Aulis, Bankes' Hecuba, and many others which lie concealed in our larger libraries. Even musical versions of the plays, on the model of Mendelssohn's versions of Sophocles, are not wanting. For we have recently Gadsby's Alcestis, and what is far more interesting and almost unknown, Miss Helen Faucit appeared as Iphigenia (in Aulis) in the Dublin Theatre Royal, in November, 1848. The version was arranged for her by Mr. Calcraft, and the music of the chorus composed by R. M. Levey. The most elaborate German criticisms of the poet's genius and his works are those in Bernhardy's and Klein's histories of the Greek drama; the best French book is M. Patin's Étude. But the literature of the subject would occupy a separate volume.
THE END.
- ↑ The worst of these notes may be of Byzantine origin.
- ↑ By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap,
To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
and pluck up drowned honour by the locks;
So he that doth redeem her thence might wear
Without corrival all her dignities.—Part I. i. 3. - ↑ As I have not been able to consult these works, I am unable to say whether they are independent of Dolce or were copied from his versions.
- ↑ Here are his words: "Heretofore men in highest dignity have laboured not a little to be thought able to compose a tragedy; of that honour Dionysius the elder was no less ambitious, than before of his attaining to the tyranny. Augustus Cæsar also had begun his Ajax; but, unable to please his own judgment with what he had begun, left it unfinished. Seneca, the philosopher, is by some thought the author of those tragedies (at least the best of them) that go under that name. Gregory Nazianzen, a father of the church, thought it not unbeseeming the sanctity of his person to write a tragedy, which is entitled 'Christ Suffering.' This is mentioned to vindicate tragedy from the small esteem or rather infamy, which in the acct of many it undergoes at this day with other common interludes; happening through the poet's errour of intermixing comick stuff with tragick sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar persons, which by all judicious hath been counted absurd; and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people."
- ↑ The following are a few of the documents which illustrate this now obscure period of the- British drama in its relation to Euripides:
- 1677. Davenant's Circe (a combination of the Iphigenia in Tauris and the legend of Circe).
- 1685. The tracts of Thomas Rymer on tragedy, criticising Shakspere, and applauded by Dryden.
- 1690. Translation of the Abbé Hedelin's Art of the Stage, from the French.
- 1698. An Iphigenia, produced at Lincoln's Inn Fields.
- 1700. Achilles anil Iphigenia in Aulis, produced at Drury Lane.
- 1715. Edmund Smith's Phædra and Hippolytus.
- 1726. The Hecuba of Richard West, afterwards Lord Chancellor of Ireland, which the author complains of as a failure,owing to an ignorant audience.
- 1748. An Iphigenia in Tauris, by Gilbert West.
- 1749. A Hecuba by Morell
- ↑ In this, as in most of his opinions, Voltaire was not consistent. He was at one time carried away by the admiration of the new against the old, and said many insolent and unjust things about the Greek masters as compared with the French. But I prefer to cite his more solid judgments in the text. The best book in which to study the views of the "moderns" is La Harpe's book on literature, in which he boldly states that the chief merit of Sophocles is to have inspired Racine, and that Euripides may be excused because he suggested a Medea to Corneille. The Encyclopædists began the reaction now established in public opinion.