40 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 



drama of his predecessors. At the same time he produced 

 in the ' Agamemnon ' a masterpiece of supreme artistic power. 

 The majesty and glory of that unique play depend upon the 

 perfect interpenetration of a still vivid spiritual faith with 

 still ascendant poetry. The type attained completion, but 

 awaited an artist who should round and temper it with more 

 consummate grace and more of human charm. Sophocles, 

 less profoundly interested in the religious idea than ^Eschylus, 

 manipulates his subject-matter more deliberately as an artist. 

 He stands aloof from the mythus without losing sight of its 

 vivifying inner significance. But he begins to decompose 

 the colossal mass which yEschylus, deriving this from 

 predecessors, had moulded into so ponderous a fabric of 

 architectural magnificence. By breaking up the trilogy, 

 and by moralising the conception of theological Nemesis, 

 Sophocles made tragedy at once more manageable and more 

 humanly interesting. The type, in his hands, undergoes an 

 important transformation, which prepares us to expect the 

 next stage. With Euripides the disintegration of the type 

 begins. He neglects the mythus, or uses it only for the 

 exhibition of human nature currently observed by him, 

 modelling character as realistically as the conditions imposed 

 upon all playwrights by the Attic stage allowed. The 

 theosophy of .ZEschylus, always implicit in Sophocles, survives 

 as a mere conventionality in Euripides. His work might, in 

 truth, be compared to the rhetorical performances of Fletcher 

 in the Romantic style. Again, he concentrates his powers 

 on single characters, single episodes, single motives, often 

 of great beauty, but disconnected from the harmony of parts 

 which the type, as still existing, demanded. His poverty 

 of design, his lack of spiritual enthusiasm, his sceptical 

 and jaded mood of mind, were concealed beneath a mass of 

 casuistical sophistries and stylistic elegances. These delighted 

 the public of his day, who hailed as progress what was really 

 the sublime commencement of the decadence. 



Unfortunately, we are unable to carry the exposition 

 further on sure ground. Yet what we can collect about the 

 plays of Agathon and Chasremon justifies us in believing that 



