or Sophocles' worldly wisdom, he groped perpetually after some
means to stay the downward progress of things; he could not
thunder like the one, nor live easily and let live, like the
other.--I do not give you these scraps of criticism (which are
not my own, but borrowed always I think), for the sake of
criticism; but for the sake of history;--understand them, and
you have the story of the age illumined. You can read the inner
Athens here, in the aspirations and in the limitations of
Euripides, and in the contempt in which Athens held him; as you
can read it in the grandeur of Aeschylus, and the Athenian
acceptance of, and then reaction against, him; and in the
character of Sophocles and his easy relations with his age. When
Euripides came, the light of the Gods had gone. He was blindish;
he would not accept the Gods without question. Yet was he on the
side of the Gods whom he could not see or understand; we must
count him on their side, and loved by them. He was not panoplied,
like Aeschylus or Milton, in their grim and shining armor; yet
what armor he wore bore kindred proud dints from the hellions'
batterings. Or perhaps mostly he wore such marks as wounds upon
his own flesh. . . . Not even a total lack of humor, which I
suppose must be attributed to him, can make him appear less than
a most sympathetic, an heroic figure. He was the child and
fruitage and outcast of his age, belonging as much to an Athens
declining and inwardly hopeless, as did Aeschylus (at first) to
Athens in her early glory. He was not so much bothered (like
Sophocles) with no message, as bothered with the fact that he had
no clear and saving message. His realism--for compared with the
other two, he was a sort of realist--was the child of his
despair; and his despair, of the atmosphere of his age.