agedy; it exhibits
man in action, but it makes no real attempt to individualize him.
The unsurpassed grandeur with which the struggle between man and
destiny fulfils its course in Aeschylus depends substantially on
the circumstance, that each of the contending powers is only conceived
broadly and generally; the essential humanity in Prometheus and
Agamemnon is but slightly tinged by poetic individualizing. Sophocles
seizes human nature under its general conditions, the king, the old
man, the sister; but not one of his figures displays the microcosm of
man in all his aspects--the features of individual character. A high
stage was here reached, but not the highest; the delineation of man
in his entireness and the entwining of these individual--in themselves
finished--figures into a higher poetical whole form a greater
achievement, and therefore, as compared with Shakespeare, Aeschylus
and Sophocles represent imperfect stages of development. But, when
Euripides undertook to present man as he is, the advance was logical
and in a certain sense historical rather than poetical. He was
able to destroy the ancient tragedy, but not to create the modern.
Everywhere he halted half-way. Masks, through which the expression
of the life of the soul is, as it were, translated from the particular
into the general, were as necessary for the typical tragedy of
antiquity as they are incompatible with the tragedy of character;
but Euripides retained them. With remarkably delicate tact the older
tragedy had never presented the dramatic element, to which it was
unable to allow free scope, unmixed, but had constantly fettered it
in some measure by epic subjects from the superhuman world of gods and
heroes and by the lyrical choruses. One feels that Euripides was
impatient under these fetters: with his subjects he came down at least
to semi-historic times, and his choral chants were of so subordinate
importance, that they were frequently omitted in subsequent
performance and hardly to the injury of the pieces; but yet he has
neither placed his figures wholly on the ground of reality, nor
entirely thrown aside the chorus. Throughout and on all sides he is
the full exponent of an age in which, on the one hand, the grandest
historical and philosophical movement was going forward, but in which,
on the other hand, the primitive fountain of all poetry--a pure and
homely national life--had become turbid. While the reverential piety
of the olde