Tradition and Progress · 1922

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This is an OCR edition with typos.

Excerpt from book:

Ill THE BACCHAE IN RELATION TO CERTAIN CURRENTS OF THOUGHT IN THE FIFTH CENTURY1 OF the two dramas that make up the main part of this volume, the Hippolytus can be left to speak for itself. Its two thousand five hundred years have left little mark upon it. It has something of the stateliness of age, no doubt, but none of the staleness or lack of sympathy. With all the severe lines of its beauty, it is tender, subtle, quick with human feeling. Even its religious conceptions, if we will but take them simply, forgetting the false mythology we have learned from handbooks, are easily understood and full of truth. One of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of love tragedies, it deals with a theme that might easily be made ugly. It is made ugly by later writers, especially by the commentators whom we can see always at work from the times of the ancient scholia down to our own days. Even Racine, who wished to be kind to his Phedre, has let her suffer by contact with certain deadly and misleading suggestions. But the Phaedra of Euripides was quite another woman, and the quality of her love, apart from its circumstances, is entirely fragrant and clear. The Hippolytus, like most works that come from a strong personality, has its mannerisms and, no doubt, its flaws. But in the main it is a singularly satisfying and complete work of art, a thing of beauty, to contemplate and give thanks for, surrounded by an atmosphere of haunting purity. 1 Originally an introduction to a volume of translations of tht Hippolytus, Bacchae and Frogs (vol. iii of The Athenian Drama. Guq. Allon and Unwin, Ltd.). If we turn to The Bacchae, we find a curious difference. As an effort of genius it is perhaps greater than the Hippolytus, at any rate more unusual and rare in quality. But it is unsatisfyi...