imental comedy, such as
the -Iphigenia in Aulis-, the -Ion-, the -Alcestis-, produce perhaps
the most pleasing effect of all his numerous works. With equal
frequency, but with less success, the poet attempts to bring into play
an intellectual interest. Hence springs the complicated plot, which
is calculated not like the older tragedy to move the feelings, but
rather to keep curiosity on the rack; hence the dialectically pointed
dialogue, to us non-Athenians often absolutely intolerable; hence the
apophthegms, which are scattered throughout the pieces of Euripides
like flowers in a pleasure-garden; hence above all the psychology of
Euripides, which rests by no means on direct reproduction of human
experience, but on rational reflection. His Medea is certainly in so
far painted from life, that she is before departure properly provided
with money for her voyage; but of the struggle in the soul between
maternal love and jealousy the unbiassed reader will not find much in
Euripides. But, above all, poetic effect is replaced in the tragedies
of Euripides by moral or political purpose. Without strictly or
directly entering on the questions of the day, and having in view
throughout social rather than political questions, Euripides in the
legitimate issues of his principles coincided with the contemporary
political and philosophical radicalism, and was the first and chief
apostle of that new cosmopolitan humanity which broke up the old Attic
national life. This was the ground at once of that opposition which
the ungodly and un-Attic poet encountered among his contemporaries,
and of that marvellous enthusiasm, with which the younger generation
and foreigners devoted themselves to the poet of emotion and of love,
of apophthegm and of tendency, of philosophy and of humanity. Greek
tragedy in the hands of Euripides stepped beyond its proper sphere and
consequently broke down; but the success of the cosmopolitan poet was
only promoted by this, since at the same time the nation also stepped
beyond its sphere and broke down likewise. The criticism of
Aristophanes probably hit the truth exactly both in a moral and in a
poetical point of view; but poetry influences the course of history
not in proportion to its absolute value, but in proportion as it is
able to forecast the spirit of the age, and in this respect Euripides
was unsurpassed. And thus it happened, that Alexander read him
diligently; that Aristotle developed the idea