William L. Chenery

Euripides and His Age, by Gilbert Murray. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

The “conspiracy of silence” which oppressed the youth of those of us who were born in the late Victorian era never seems more hateful than when some master hand connects the present labors of liberty with the strivings of the infinite past. In some fashion the dominating spirits of a generation ago contrived to make the struggles for human freedom appear as ugly isolated episodes without precursors or ancestry. They forgot the Shelleys and the Godwins and they even denied the significance of the classic forerunners of today’s ardent prophets.

There were happy exceptions. Some of us cherish the teachings of a Virginia professor who, as far as the adolescent capacities of his students permitted, bridged the gap between Socrates’s free questionings and the contemporary yearnings for a world of uncompromising justice and beauty. What that Southern student did for his small band of followers Gilbert Murray has long been doing for the great world. His present contribution belongs to that satisfying series, The Home University Library. Incidentally, one reflects that this Home University is one of the few institutions of learning which has completely avoided the blinders so many are complacently wearing. The Euripides of Murray suggests to the author—and to the reader, one may claim—both Tolstoi and Ibsen. But, one hastens to state, Professor Murray is too learned and thoughtful a man to paint a revolutionary Euripides such as The Masses—much as one loves that exuberant Don Quixote—would delight to honor and to portray. His onset, however, catches us:

The suffragist and the feminist movements have recently brought the great dramatist to his proper appreciation in respect to women. Some of the passages in the Medea are quoted as often in suffragist campaigns as the words of Bernard Shaw or of Olive Schreiner. This Greek is sometimes said to be the first literary man who understood women. For that reason, as Professor Murray so charmingly emphasizes, Euripides was ever accounted a woman hater, despite even the implications of his great chorus which sings so nobly woman’s destined rise as a power in the world. His statement of the cause of barbarian woman against a civilized man who has wronged her is incomparably more contemporary than Madam Butterfly, and with Murray we may doubt “if ever the deserted one has found such words of fire as Medea speaks.” And, as the author continues, “Medea is not only a barbarian; she is also a woman, and fights the horrible war that lies, an eternally latent possibility, between woman and man. Some of the most profound and wounding things said both by Medea and Jason might almost be labelled in a book of extracts ‘Any Wife to Any Husband’ or ‘Any Husband to Any Wife.’”

The change which came over the spirit of Euripides’s vision, as Athens itself was transformed by empire lust from the first glories of Pericles, suggest again the purifying satire of our ablest moderns. War is hateful and the picture which the Attic dramatist drew of the horrors of dying Troy leave little to the present imagination. Euripides accordingly became as popular in imperialistic Athens as was Bebel among the Kaiser’s ministers. Murray interprets this phase magnificently. He concludes: “This scene, with the parting between Andromache and the child which follows, seems to me perhaps the most heartrending in all the tragic literature of the world. After rising from it one understands Aristotle’s judgment of Euripides as the ‘most tragic of the poets.’” One has only to recall the brave gentleness of Hector’s wife, described first in Homeric words, to agree with the present author.

On the purely critical side Professor Murray’s words are vastly important. Especially valuable is his discussion of the chorus and the deus ex machina concerning which so much error has been taught since Horace wrote on the art of poetry. But this small book is not designed for those whose interest in Greek drama is technical. It is Euripides, the philosopher; Euripides, the satirist of his times; Euripides, the preacher of lofty virtues, the apostle of new men and more righteous gods, who concerns the great awakening world of 1914. The intellectual battles which Euripides fought on behalf of Athens have been waged again and often for the millions who slumber and are content. They are being fought now with an intensity unprecedented. So it brings courage and it brings calm to realize the continuity of the conflict, and to recall the signal victories of the olden days. Gilbert Murray’s achievements are too numerous to permit praise. One may only say now that the present book is in line with the fine things of his past; that by virtue of his labors the world agony for liberty and justice and beauty reveals new phases of the intrinsic dignity and honor which have been its possession since men desired better things.