THE IDEA OF TRAGEDY 697 



once disturb and improve, ruin and save. By the side, therefore, of 

 his splendidly villainous women like Phaedra and Medea and Sthene- 

 boea, women who break through every natural impulse with un- 

 daunted recklessness, he will give you women who are patterns of 

 high moral duty, women filled through and through with the idea 

 of self-sacrifice, willing victims, like Polyxena and the beautiful 

 Iphigenia not, as in the older dramatist, killed by her father, but 

 going voluntarily to the altar for the sake of the Trojan expedition. 

 So, too, there is no higher example of conjugal love than that of Al- 

 cestis, who died for her unworthy lord. 



Like Virgil after him, Euripides sees also the artistic value be- 

 tween man and maid. This was a complete innovation in tragedy. 

 Plato thought that love itself was not a worthy theme in drama. 

 Aristophanes derides it. But the poet's contemporaries who were 

 themselves perhaps learning a softer mood of romance, as the great 

 patriotic impulses of the Persian wars were dying away, appreciated 

 the novelty as though it were indeed a revelation. Take the young 

 Haemon with his love of Antigone, cheerfully dying for her sake, or 

 take the moving treatement of "Perseus and Andromeda," which seems 

 to have captivated Athenian audiences though it only exists for 

 us in fragments. Andromeda, as Professor Lewis Campbell remarks 

 in his interesting book on Greek tragedy, says the very words to her 

 deliverer which Miranda in " The Tempest," says to Ferdinand : 

 " Sir, take me with you, whether as your servant, or wife, or hand- 

 maid," anticipates Miranda's " To be your fellow you may deny me, 

 but I will be your servant, whether you will or no." Euripides may 

 or may not have been a misogynist, but at all events he was one of 

 the " Feminists," a protagonist in that movement which so profoundly 

 influences the Norwegian dramatist Ibsen. 



In what I have said I have already anticipated some of the condi- 

 tions of a modern age. In a remarkable speech to a club of work- 

 ingmen at Drontheim in 1885, Ibsen declared that " the Revolution 

 now preparing in Europe is chiefly concerned with the future of the 

 Workers and the Women. In this I place all my hopes and expecta- 

 tions, and for this I will work all my life." Here are certainly two 

 points which will mark the lifework of an advanced thinker in con- 

 temporary times. The rise of what is known as the Feminist Move- 

 ment, the echoes of which are even heard in France, as proved by 

 such remarkable novels as Femmes Nouvelles, by the Brothers Mar- 

 gueritte, and Une Nouvelle Douleur, by Jules Bois, must naturally 

 alter the point of view of any dramatist who is concerned with the 

 social aspects of the era. 1 Themes therefore, which treat of the con- 



i The note is, of course, different in England and France. In England it is 

 the practical inconvenience of the revolting female; in France it is the voluble 

 indignation of the baffled male. 



