religion that most people have to set themselves in some relation to; the religion that Tolstoi preaches against, that people like Paley and Bentham tried to abolish, that Plato denounced and followed. Euripides has got to it in this form through his own peculiar character, through the mixture in him of unshrinking realism with unshrinking imaginativeness; but one must remember that he wrote much about Orphism in its ascetic and mystic side, and devoted to it one complete play, the Cretans.
In the end, perhaps, this two-sidedness remains as the cardinal fact about Euripides: he is a merciless realist; he is the greatest master of imaginative music ever born in Attica. He analyses, probes, discusses, and shrinks from no sordidness; then he turns right away from the world and escapes "to the caverns that the Sun's feet tread,"[1] or similar places, where things are all beautiful and interesting, melancholy perhaps, like the tears of the sisters of Phaëthon, but not squalid or unhappy. Some mysticism was always in him from the time of the Hippolytus (l. 192): "Whatever far-off state there may be that is dearer to man than life, Darkness has it in her arms and hides it in cloud. We are love-sick for this nameless thing that glitters here on the earth, because no man has tasted another life, because the things under us are unrevealed, and we float upon a stream of legend." There is not one play of Euripides in which a critic cannot find serious flaws and offences; though it is true, perhaps, that the worse the critic, the more he will find. Euripides was not essentially an artist. He was a man of extraordinary brain-power,
- ↑ Hip. 733. The cavern in question was in the moon. Cf. Apollonius, Arg. iii. 1212, and Plutarch On the Face in the Moon, § 29, Hym. Dem. 25.
