The Theory of Greek Tragedy 39 
since his drama is a marvellous illustration of the vices, frailties, 
and weaknesses, the “humanity” of mortals, its author is not 
undeserving of the epithet with which he has been graced by a 
late romantic admirer, “Euripides the human’”’—an attribution 
with whose sentiment a majority of Athenian critics would prob- 
ably have concurred. 
In these respects Euripides is not very unlike Ibsen. Like 
the latter he too is unmistakably decadent and obsessed by the 
nightmare of ugliness. It is not so much, perhaps, that he dotes 
upon the sordid, the base, and the malodorous—though at times 
he displays no little complacency in their depiction—as that they 
haunt and fascinate him; they block up his view till he can see 
little or nothing else. As far as he is concerned, the heroic has 
ceased to exist; Helen is a baggage, Agamemnon a politician, 
Menelaus a cuckold, Ulysses a trickster, Orestes an epileptic. 
For the tragic emotion of horror he substitutes disgust; for the 
moral qualm of his predecessors a shrinking of the flesh, a sense 
of physical repugnance and nausea. His most distinctive dra- 
matic effect results from a certain uncanniness of character and 
motive. He is temperamentally ambiguous, equivocal, evasive, 
shifty. He is prone to blink the issue, to refuse to look the tragic 
fact square in the face. His instinct is to deny it, if possible, to 
juggle it away by some trick of theatrical legerdemain; at all 
events to deprive it of moral relevence and competency. 
It is evident, for instance, that he can see no sense, no reason 
of any kind in the sacrifice of Iphigenia. It is merely odious to 
him as it was to Racine centuries later. And yet what becomes 
of the tragedy without it? There is no apparént violation of 
justice, nothing to raise a doubt or suggest a suspicion; there is 
no qualm, no agony of question, no mystery at once terrible and 
revelatory. It is all perfectly simple, open, and morally intel- 
ligible. The interest centers exclusively upon the dramatis per- 
sonae and their conflicting emotions. It is distinctively a modern, 
a psychological play. As contrasted with the Aeschylean and 
Sophoclean tragedy of principle, it is concerned solely with char- 
acter and its expression. 
In the Electra, on the other hand, the absence of a clear 
337, 
