The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1927-12-16

beings for them so sympathetically
No one had laviShed such tender
ness upon his heroines or revealed
so intimately the suf1erings of the
soul.
TINE man had an almost Shelley
L an sensitivity to the misfor-
tunes of mankind. Edith Browning
felt it and called him
"Our Euripides the Human.
With his droppings of warm
tears.
And his touches of things
common
Till they rose to touch the
spheres"
Aristophanes charged him with
sentimentality. and had excuse; Eu-
ripides is never through with the
pangs of despised love and the
breaking of maternal hearts.
But these were the things the 9TH
ers ignored; their plays and poetry
had told Of kings and wars, but not
of women and men, not of wives and
mothers left mourning distantly, nor
of common soldiers crushed under
chariot wheels.
Euripides, then, is the romantic
dramatist par excellence; like Mi
randa, he suffers with those he sees
suffer, and he writes with the re-
sentiment of a man who can not I'M
derstand why men should suffer so.
Aeschylus was confident that the
gods would reward virtue and pun
ish vice; Euripides regrets to an
nounce that the evidence runs the
other way. He stands to Aeschvlus
as doubling Job to believing Isaiah;
no wonder some scholars have
thought the Book of Job Euripi-
dean tragedy. y
Human fortune or misfortune, our
dramatist thinks, is not gift or a
blow from the gods; mans history
is determined not by supernatural
decree, but by his character; and a
mans character, as Heraclitus put
it, is his fate.
So Euripides writes with feeling
and without apology. He has not
the stern sublimity of AeschyluS, nor
the classic calm and objectivity of
Sophocles; he bears the same rela-
ton to these as the emotional
Dostoievski to the Titanic Tolstoi
and the impeccable Turgeniev.
But it is in DostoievSki that we
find our secret hearts revealed and
our secret longings understood; and
it is in Euripides that Greek drama,
tired of Olympus, came down to
earth and dealt revealingly with
men.
Have all the nations of the world
since his time" asked Goethe, pro-
duced one dramatist worthy to hand
him his slippers?" Just one.
u y
THE PACIFIST
A S Euripides looked about him
IA it seemed to his eyes that men
were exploited by kings, and women
by men, and all of them by gods.
When he was 20 lin 459 B. CO. the
first Peloponnesian War broke out
between Athens and Sparta, and
ragged for thirteen years.
When he was so the second Pelop-
onnesian War began; for thirty
years, like an intermittent fever, it
ran its destructive course, and Eli
ripides did not live to see it's bitter
close.
Judge his feelings from his prayer,
which has come down to us as a
fragment from the lost play,
"Cresphontes"::-
o Peace, thou givest plenty,
as from a deep spring; there is
no beauty like unto thine; no,
not even among the blessed
gods. My heart yearneth within
me, for thou Earliest; grow old
and thou returnest not.
Shall WEAKNESS overcome
mine eyes before they see thy
bloom and thy loneliness?
When the lovely songs Of the
dancers are heard again and the
thronging feet Of them that
wear garlands, shall gray hairs
'and sorrow have destroyed me
utterly?
Return, thou holy one, to our
city; abide not far from us, thou
that quencheth wrath.
Strife and bitterness shall de-
part If thou art with us; mad
ness and the edge of the sword
shall flee from our doors.
Like Plato, EuripideS pleaded with
his countrymen to make peace and
to unite with Sparta in a Pan-Hel-
lenic League rather than fight with