The Male Characters Of Euripides

The Male Characters Of Euripides by
E M Blaiklock MA D.Litt.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE EPILEPTIC

WHEN we come to Euripides,' writes Pearson, in his introduction to the Phoenissae, 'we are let down to earth.... If our notions of ancient art are shaped on
the ideal pattern, we experience a feeling as of a sudden jar or shock when brought face to face with the realistic aspect of a Euripidean play; there is what seems at first sight a blending of the ancient point of view with the modern, an acquiescence in the ugliness of certain features of suffering which we are apt to think more appropriate to the twentieth century....
With every fresh disaster we are forced to utter the question-why should such things be? And at the same time we are driven to admit that, though we cannot explain them, they are none the less true. This is pre-eminently true of the Hercules Furens.
The Hercules Furens rivals the Bacchae in the strangeness of its theme, and if it can be demonstrated that these two plays were built out of the stuff of real life, an important point has been made in support of our main contention, that Euripides prime interest was the character of men and women, and that his dramatic presentation of humanity is marked by psychological insight of the highest order, and based upon a notable
acuteness of observation. What, we may ask, led Euripides to choose as a subject of tragedy the strange tale of the madness of Heracles? The Attic associations of the myth, which were his main concern in the Heracleidae, cannot have been his chief motive in this case. The play is moving to its close when Theseus appears for the glory of Athens. This was not 'a grand patriotic drama of the type of Cymbeline. Nor was it a piece of rationalistic propaganda. Verrall's thesis, as is well known, has staked much on the play. It maintains that Euripides, in his clever and amazingly subtle campaign against the gods of popular belief, found in the story of the mad son of Zeus golden grist for his purpose. The whole myth, according to Verrall, was built by human ignorance out of the material of madness. All the famous Labours were the delusions of a diseased brain. A slaying of water snakes or eels swarming in a Theban lake led to the story of the hundred-headed hydra.
Some doughty skirmish with mounted bandits led, through the distortions of an unbalanced mind, to a tale of Centaurs out to kill. Theseus was rescued, courageously enough, but from some cave or dungeon whose horror of black darkness, magnified by mental derangement, inspired a story of Hades invaded and its laws defied. All this, according to Verrall, is suggested in the play by undertones of dialogue and chorus, and by the obvious implications of the major theme. Heracles was mad.
He had always been mad. Behold the climax. As usual, Verrall went too far. His theory had elements of truth. We have insisted that Euripides was a realist. If he was also a 'rationalist' that attitude was a by-product of his realism. If this idea is accepted as true, with the modifications which it imposes, it is almost possible to restate Verrall's theory in a form which avoids the difficulties and retains the truth.
Let us then admit that all the indications suggest that Heracles was for Euripides no divine being but a man, 'emphatically a man, a man in the full vigour of his manhood'.
Euripides possibly believed, as one might be prepared to.
The paragraph continues '.
... but a normal man, of the
normal human pattern, neither above nor below.' This can hardly be said of a madman of any description. It is certainly not true of Heracles.
And as Lucretius probably believed, that the great figures of legend were the folk-memories of benefactors of humanity. However the Heracles of the Alcestis is inter-preted, and we have noted in that connection the wide difference between Verrall's and Browning's equally plausible interpretation of the hero, it appears obvious that Euripides mind dwelt upon the human characteristics of the legendary personality, and that he was at pains to set them in relief. Verrall then may be granted the admission that, in Euripides opinion, the story of the Labours had a rationalistic explanation. Euripides, however, was not, and here is the point at which concessions to Verrall's hypothesis must end, primarily concerned with damaging a corrupt religion. Perhaps, at first, it was a search for patriotic themes which led him to the Theban legend cycle of Heracles and his children. There he found a story of insanity, of a demi-God who slew his wife and children.
He found the story in something like a finished form. He did not, like Shakespeare with his Lear, deduce a final insanity from the case history of a life.
The story appealed to Euripides as the raw material of tragedy. Kitto, who is curiously impatient with any attempt to test the realism of the play, admits that 'abnormality had a fascination for Euripides. Two reasons may be assigned for this.
Salient characters such as lunatics, eccentrics, and criminals are not likely to escape the notice of the dramatist, who necessarily finds in them motives for great effect, and for unusual and tragic situations, without departing from truth and probability. With Heracles, Euripides was doing what Zola, the
Most determined of French realists, did with his epileptic moral madman in La Bête Humaine.
Tomorrow we shall continue with the play “the epileptic “. Thank you for reading thus far.