40 P. H. Frye 
moral issue has resulted in what is mainly a drama of incident. 
Orestes is nothing more or less than a monster for his pains, 
Apollo a scoundrel for instigating him to an unnatural murder; 
that is all there is to it. Aside from the morbid psychology 
incidental to the situation attention has nothing to perch upon 
except the stratagem and imposture by which Aegisthus and 
Clytemnestra are disposed of. The tragic problem has vanished 
completely ; there is nothing left but a particularly harrowing and 
truculent melodrama. 
As a result of his inability to make anything out of his fables 
and his impatience with the interpretations of others Euripides 
is reduced, in the article of theme, to the secondary réle of critic. 
This is his fundamental weakness as a playwright. It shows 
itself in the loose construction, the faulty economy, the feeble 
effect of his individual dramas taken each as a whole, to say noth- 
ing of his faultfinding digressions on the management of his pre- 
decessors. In particular, since he sees no sense in his action as 
such and has no inkling of its final cause or rationale, it is only 
with the greatest difficulty that he can bring a play to a close at 
all—only by some conventional or arbitrary expedient, a dra- 
matic cliché or theatrical miracle. As a matter of fact, his pieces 
seldom conclude; they terminate. Hence his abuse of the deus 
ex machina, which in contradicting or interrupting the logic of 
events, is to all intents and purposes a nullity, as in Iphigenia at 
Aulis, or else is effective only in dispelling the illusion, as in 
Orestes. 
The effect of all this activity was inevitably to discredit and 
invalidate the value of the symbols with which Euripides himself 
was obliged to work. In transforming in this way the old myth- 
ology into a new psychology his treatment of his matter resulted 
in dissolving its moral ideas and in emptying it of its moral con- 
tent. But inasmuch as he had nothing else to build upon, he 
virtually knocked the ground from under his own feet and was 
obliged to search his materials for other means of defraying the 
expenses of a public performance. It is for this reason that in 
turning his attention from the sense of the transaction as a 
whole, he comes to make so much of its constituent moments. 
338 
