toning-down of the traditional form may help to make intelligible the anomalous fact, of which there seems to be undoubted evidence, that the Alcestis was produced in the year 438 B.C., i.e. comparatively early in the career of Euripides, as the fourth play of a tetralogy, that is to say, as a substitute for the satyric play.

The remarks of Professor Jebb upon this subject in his article on Euripides in the Encyclopædia Britannica ought to be specially consulted.1

1 Ency. Brit. vol. viii. pp. 674, 675: "The Alcestis is altogether removed .. the purely Hellenic drama to the romantic.”

is reversed.

ALL dramatic interest turns on the treatment of situation and character, and it is impossible that these two elements should in reality be separated. But it has been argued that, while in the ancient drama the action is primary and the persons only subordinate, in Shakespearian tragedy this order Recent criticism, however, has vindicated for Shakespeare the essential unity of action and of idea without which no drama can be great. What here concerns us is to show cause for the assertion made in a previous chapter, that while the persons of the ancient stage are less complex than those of Shakespeare, they are not less real.

But first it may be well to hear the other side, and to ascertain how far the view which we are questioning has been pushed by a priori criticism.

Winckelmann compares the beauty of Greek art to the purity of water drawn at the source,

1 Books to consult : Paul Stapfer, Sh. et les Trag. Grecs; Patin, Les Tragiques Grecs; Sophocles in Green's "Classical Writers."

which is without flavour. This comparison is upheld by Schelling, and is somewhat hesitatingly applied by M. Paul Stapfer to the protagonists of Greek tragedy, each of whom appears to him the embodiment of a moral idea, so that their conflict has in it nothing personal, but is equivalent to the clashing of incompatible abstract principles, or, in the language of the Greeks, of opposed divinities. Through the annihilation of the human agents the divine contradiction is harmonised. This

theory, which seems to be somewhat rashly generalised from an ultra-Hegelian study of the Antigone, cannot be accepted without considerable qualification. Most true, the divine agency is omnipresent, even when not visibly brought upon the scene; and if this truth were carried out to a logical result, the human persons would dwindle into insignificance. But neither the poet nor his audience reasoned thus. To their apprehension all the persons were characteristically distinct; all the more so because each of them is "solid" and of one piece. And so they are also to the modern reader who lives long enough with them to make their acquaintance, and has not been previously too much dazzled by the miraculous fulness and variety of Shakespeare.1 Nor can M. Stapfer's

1 Heracles' treatment of Deianira is not the result of any magic, such as that which excuses Dushyanta's forgetfulness of Sakuntalá, but of an impulsive nature absorbed in a new passion.

further assertion be admitted, that in this respect Euripides is in advance of Sophocles.1

The Clytemnestra of Aeschylus is not merely, as she herself asserts in defending herself against the elders, the incarnation of some vengeful household fiend, or, as she pleads afterwards with her threatening son, a passive instrument in the hands. of Fate. She is a woman of heroic mould, denaturalised with solitary brooding over the wrongs of outraged maternity, but still a woman. When her hour arrives, she uses all the concentrated energy which belongs to a powerful nature. possessed with a dominant idea. Yet she retains so much of genuine womanhood as sincerely to love the man who protects her and abets her crime. When she sees him dead her self-possession deserts her, and she forgets her own imminent danger in her grief for him. True, she has no compunctious visitings," no hypnotic reaction, like Lady Macbeth, no subconscious undercurrent of remorse. She is the same in the other world as in this, and hounds on the Furies although herself a powerless shade. There, if you will, is

1 See Mommsen's Hist. of Rome, ii. 444. "In Aeschylus each of the contending powers is only conceived broadly and generally . . Sophocles seizes human nature in its broader types, the king, the old man, the sister; but not . . . the features of individual character." Also A. Ward in Ency. Brit. art. "Drama," p. 406 b: “If his (Euripides') men and women are less heroic and statuesque (than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles) they are more like men and women."

"the solidity of the antique." But the "psychology" of Aeschylus is less at fault than some modern critics have imagined. Has he not, in the concluding scene of the Agamemnon, depicted for us in this man-slaying woman some of the natural shrinking of feminine human nature from unnecessary bloodshed, the satiety of a heart that by violence has gained an end long sought, a mind not incapable of horror, and a will whose very strength of determination shows itself in minimising the extent of guilt? She does not rage illimitably, like some French or Russian tigress who has tasted blood. No other character in Aeschylus is so fully developed as his Clytemnestra and Cassandra are,-his Agamemnon, for example, is but slightly drawn,—but in all his dramatis personae he manifests the same undefinable and incommunicable power of "giving the world assurance" of a human being. For it hardly needs to be observed that his gods, when they come upon the scene, are also human.

Sophocles, the consummate artist, proceeds by a different method. Instead of being sketched in bold broad lines, his characters are etched, as it were, with fineness and extreme care. But neither is his outline wanting in strength and firmness. Like all else in his dramas, the persons are adapted to the central situation and the main intention, and it is only after a careful review of