38 Po. Fege 
ration as to the tyrant’s arrogance its fitting correction, at the 
same time that he asserts the existence of a higher authority than 
the judgment of particulars—yet for all this, which escapes us 
more or less but was clear enough to the Greeks, I would not assert 
that he himself had in mind any such fleshless formula as that 
which I have applied to his work. All I mean, is that he con- 
ceived in a certain way and to a certain effect, which I have 
tried to analyze—roughly and bunglingly enough, I dare say. 
No doubt he worked by touch, not by measure. He was not 
likely to stop to anatomize an effective subject if it yielded the 
proper emotions on inspection. But that in spite of the modern 
perplexity of its theme and the spontaneity of its creation the 
Antigone does take down regularly, I have tried to show. Gen- 
erically and schematically it is, like the other works of its author, 
the tragedy of the individual will. 
In general terms, it is from the same source, the conflict of the 
ethic with the moral, that Euripides derives his drama. But 
unlike his predecessors he fails to sustain the supremacy or even 
the importance of the latter principle, and failing to do so, misses 
the distinctive double note of Greek tragedy. His favourite pro- 
cedure is to represent morality as a hollow convention or tradi- 
tion with little or no title to reverence or credit. As a result his 
characters are either interesting sinners like Medea and Phaedra 
or superstitious bigots and credulous gulls like Orestes and Mene- 
laus. They are seldom or never actuated by conscience or con- 
viction, a sense of duty or obligation, but impulse or appetite, 
desire or caprice. Like Racine’s heroes and heroines, they are 
creatures of passion, not of resolution—they suffer their destiny 
rather than incur it. Of the same order too are the motives of 
his divinities like the Aphrodite in Hippolytus or the Apollo in 
Ion. As his tragedy is destitute of a principle of any kind, it 
has no minatory or exemplary force to speak of. If it is moral 
at all, it is so, not in the Aeschylean or Sophoclean, but in the 
modern, the humanitarian, manner. In this one sense, since his 
drama—with the exception of a few artless and appealing but 
hardly tragic figures, like Iphigenia, who are usually the dupes or 
victims of the plausible and unscrupulous knaves about them— 
336 
