The Theory of Greek Tragedy 4I 
Unable to comprehend the ebb and flow of the tides, he can only 
admire the ebulliency and agitation of their surface. In this 
manner he becomes the dramatist of passion. This is his merit 
and distinction. For this kind of thing he was eminently fitted. 
Before he created them, such figures as Phaedra and Medea had 
never been dreamed of; and in some respects they have never 
been surpassed from that day to this. And yet this limitation— 
for limitation it is to see nothing but the passions to which an 
action gives rise and to miss its moral import as a whole—results 
in laying the principal dramatic stress upon sentiment; it makes 
the pathetic the sole effect of tragedy. 
It is in this respect, then, that Euripides, the most imitated as 
the most consonant of classic dramatists with later tastes, serves 
as a kind of transition between the serious drama of ancient and 
modern times. In his case interest had already begun to shift 
from moral to psychological problems, from the quality of 
actions to the characters of men and the activities of nature. 
It-is as though he had undertaken to forecast the terminals to- 
ward which the modern drama would move in its evolution, even 
to the amorphous and indiscriminate drame into which tragedy 
proper has finally degenerated, not to speak of the Shakespearean 
tragedy of character which he may have influenced in a measure 
through Seneca and the Racinean tragedy of passion of which 
he was obviously the direct and immediate inspiration. 
399 
