696 THE DRAMA 



blood to flow more eagerly through our veins. Did any one ever 

 feel his sense of vitality lowered by either reading or seeing on the 

 stage the ruin of Othello or the tragedy of Lear ? It is more difficult 

 to find contemporary examples, but one can feel much the same thing 

 with regard to many even of the modern novelists whose books are 

 often classed as pessimistic. Take, for instance, the two books of 

 that strong, original writer, who calls herself " Zack " On Trial 

 and Life is Life. They are pessimistic enough in all conscience, if we 

 mean by the word that the authoress is keenly conscious of the sorrow 

 of things. But the artist has known how to enhance the dignity of 

 human effort, even when she proclaims it to be hopeless. We do 

 grievous wrong to works of art if we dismiss them because they seem 

 to preach a gloomy moral. There is a gloom which is paralyzing; 

 there is another gloom which a man or woman of strong creative per- 

 sonality can turn into a very mainspring of pulsing action and life. 1 



If, therefore, we class Euripides as a pessimist, we must be .careful 

 to define what kind of pessimism he represents. He is an apt parallel 

 to the moderns because he comes after the first primitive artistic 

 impulse has waned; he lives in an age when for the majority the 

 native hue of resolution had been sicklied o'er with the pale cast of 

 thought. But on a canvas of vacillation and doubt, with a background 

 of skepticism as to the nature and existence of the gods and a resolute 

 acknowledgment that life is in many respects evil, he paints, with all 

 the more touching and picturesque pathos, suffering, struggling, 

 doomed, passionate, but always vigorous humanity. 



It is the pathos of things, indeed, the lacrimae rerum which so 

 occupy Euripides that he becomes almost romantic in the treatment 

 of his themes. It is this sense of pathos and pity which made Aristotle 

 call him the most tragic of the poets, and was in the mind doubtless 

 of Mrs. Browning when she wrote of " Euripides the human with his 

 droppings of warm tears." Men and women in the Euripidean 

 drama are always alive: they sin passionately, they transgress all 

 moral and divine laws; they destroy one another with a fierce fero- 

 city, they make glorious failures but they are vital. And just 

 because the play of life was so infinitely interesting to Euripides, 

 whether it was Anaxagoras who told him this lesson or Socrates or 

 his own artistic genius, he can put into clear light quite as many 

 virtues as the vices of which he is so prodigal. Many critics have 

 called him misogynist, and certainly he says very hard things of 

 the female sex. As a matter of fact, in the tragi-comedy of existence, 

 he realizes far more clearly than his predecessors the extraordinary 

 value from an artistic standpoint of women-characters. He . knows 

 how they can embroil and embellish human things, how they can at 



i See an essay by Mr. William Archer (contributed to the Fortnightly 

 Review), entitled "Tragedy and Pessimism." 



