XI THE MALE CHARACTERS OF EURIPIDES

XI THE MALE CHARACTERS OF EURIPIDES
By
Professor EM Blaiklock MA., Litt.D
Introduction continues from page 12

In him, as Lascelles Abercrombie puts it, 'we see the spirit of the mind withdrawing more and more from commerce with the outer world, and endeavouring, or at least desiring, to rely more on the things which it finds within itself.' That endeavour, that desire, the realist, chiefly concerned as we have seen with actuality, is ever baffling or frustrating. By the impact of his art he is ever destroying the world of illusion into which his contemporaries are wont to retire. Facing, in his chosen sphere, the facts of the present, and the realities of life, he stands as a challenge and a rebuke. His work suggests a dynamic psycho-therapy which others may not be prepared to face. The spiritual cost of such an attitude is high. That is why Euripides, daunted at last, retired to Macedonia.
Lest he be blamed for the withdrawal, a moment's consideration may be given to two romanticists. The last generation of the fifth century, with the opening years of the fourth, was an age calculated to try the doughtiest of spirits. By the good fortune of literature its influence may be traced on three creative personalities. Euripides is one. Aristophanes and Plato are the others. When Euripides withdrew from Athens, Aristophanes had still some gay and noble songs to sing.
The Frogs, in fact, was still unwritten, and that splendid comedy reveals a spirit still unquenched for all the author's forty years. What kept the great comedian and prince of satirists on his feet and fighting up to the date of the death of Socrates? It was simply faith in a great tradition, and hope built romantically upon the past. The present was difficult to bear. Euripides, at last overwhelmed, sought a quieter land.
Aristophanes found again a more heroic age. One escaped to Macedonia, one to Marathon where they speared the Mede pòs oépav. And in that same decade an eager youth reached maturity. It was ill fortune for a spirit like Plato's to be born into a world already shadowed by plague and war, to grow up under the strain and stress of unnatural conditions, to watch with young and intelligent eyes the progress of an age of decadence, and to witness as a grown man the bitterness of
defeat in war and the end of an epoch. If Aristophanes found relief in the past and drew courage for his spiritual battle from great and vanished years, Plato found comfort in the future.
Unable to serve his country in the way he would have wished, frustrated later in his gallant efforts to put his political theories into practice, ever discouraged by the haunting memory of what democracy had done to Socrates, Plato found refuge in his Utopias, and walled out in imagination the abuses he found unbearable in life.
Archaism and futurism, which Euripides' two glorious contemporaries respectively represent, are, in Toynbee’s phrase, two alternative attempts to substitute a mere transter in the time dimension for that transfer of the field of action from one spiritual plane to another which is the characteristic movement of growth..:. The soul that has been daunted by finding that it is called on to play its part in life in the tragedy of social disintegration, still cannot repudiate all movement of aim or purpose, since that would mean committing outright spiritual suicide; so it seeks to "get by" through taking the easiest spiritual option open to it.... Archaism places in the City of Cecrops the treasure that it withdraws from the City of Pericles, while Futurism withdraws its treasure from the same City of Pericles in order to place it in the City of the Sun.' The realist, in contrast, stands firm and faces the facts. In consequence, what he may have meant for simple art, art indeed for its own sake, becomes readily subject to a political interpretation. He himself, accepting the judgment, easily
becomes a satirist, his realism passing from the naive to the kritisch. This was both Euripides' fate and his reaction to it, as an examination of his work will show.
A similar environment in the modern world has widened understanding of Euripides. The age is called upon to face like tribulation, to make up, indeed, 'that which is behind' in the sufferings of the past. Professor Dodds stresses that thought in an interesting paper in the Classical Review! 'Euripides', he writes, ‘remains for us the chief representative of fifth-century irrationalism; and herein, quite apart from his greatness as a dramatist lies his importance for the history of Greek thought.
The disease of which Greek culture eventually died is known by many names. To some it appears a virulent form of scepticism; to others a virulent form of mysticism. Professor Murray has called it failure of nerve. My own name for it is systematic irrationalism.'
The symptoms, he says, are back in the world of Western culture, and that perhaps is the reason why Euripides who seemed so poor a creature to Schlegel and Jowett, whom Swinburne could describe as a scenic sophist and a mutilated monkey, is for our generation one of the most pathetic figures in the whole of literature.
There is, indeed, a strange kinship between the last generation of Athens' great fifth century and the age we live in.
Many a dilemma which has arisen again to afflict the wisdom of men was striving in the microcosm of that Hellenic world for its solution. Man is fated to learn by suffering, and the Aeschylean tragedy of his painful schooling was working to its conclusion with a sea and a peninsula for a stage. Spread across the continents it has come again to the acting, and nations still play the parts. Human nature has known little alteration over the span of recorded history, and like spiritual environments have ever tended to produce like types in character. That what makes the Athens of Thucydides and Euripides an oddly
familiar region for the mind to wander in, and the writings of both Athenians documents of the human spirit most fascinating in their interest.
It is the aim of the following review to examine Euripides' portraiture of men. His realism appears at its sharpest in his treatment of male characters. That, as is generally agreed, was because, for all his reputation, Euripides' description of women was not without its romantic elements. The statement is, of course, open to the objection that Medea and Electra, not to mention Hecuba and Phaedra, are real enough creations, and that, if so much is granted, the probability is that Polyxena, Iphigenia and Alcestis were also true to life. Humanity is sceptical of merit, but there is no final and valid reason for rejecting the possibility that fifth-century Athens, for all the social evils which marred its life, bred pure and noble types of womanhood. The question, however, need not be argued here.
It is fairly obvious that Euripides' male characters are more general and recognisable human types, and their examination will amply illustrate the main thesis.
This, briefly stated, is that Euripides' main interest was in character and not in plot. To that rule the Iphigenia in Tauris is the only real exception. In that play, frankly romantic, the interest, admittedly, centres in the incidents of an exciting and a well-constructed plot. The Suppliants, the Heracleidae, the Andromache and the Troades are not exceptions. Collective or synthetic though the characterisation of those pieces may be, it remains the main interest. The Peloponnesian War has drawn a broad band of distraction through the mass of Euripides extant tragedies, but from the Alcestis to the Bacchae it is possible to follow the thread of his main preoccupation.
Through the wide field of these surviving tragedies, the realist, concerned primarily with actuality in fact and mental process, is ever before us, complete with that interest in abnormalities and aberrations which is the mark of his literary type." The impact of one of the ancient world's most destructive conflicts turned what might have been pure and impersonal realism to propagandist and critical ends in half a dozen plays, and modified the characterisation in half a dozen more, but the exceptions prove the rule, and there is the incontrovertible fact that in his last, and in many ways his greatest play, Euripides returned as though from a great emancipation to his earliest manner. What we might have had from his pen but for the twenty years the locusts ravaged we shall never know. Meanwhile he has left us a commentary on the conflict.
Consideration has been limited to the seventeen undisputedly authentic tragedies. It is impossible to read the Rhesus together with the rest of Euripides' work, and avoid the conclusion that the play does not belong to the period represented by the body of the extant plays. It is unmistakeably different, and must either belong to a much earlier period of Euripides' activity, or, if a late origin must be accepted on other grounds, the only possible conclusion is that the play has suffered heavy redaction. On these grounds it has been omitted from the present review.
It has been found convenient to use Way's translation generally. The charge of dullness and monotony may sometimes be sustained against it. In the rendering of choric passages Way is undoubtedly heavy and verbose. Verrall, of course, set the fashion, and for Verrall's purpose, as for the purpose of the present study, Way's translation suffices. To the very sound suggestion that an original rendering, related to the argument, would in every way be desirable, a busy student has an answer, the force of which anyone who has borne the burden of teaching in a New Zealand University College will readily grant. For those interested, a Greek text of all important quotations is included in an appendix.