However, the above considerations are only pleas in mitigation of sentence. They tend to show that the _Deus ex Mâchinâ_ was not in itself ridiculous to the contemporaries of Euripides; we must go further and try to see why he liked it. The best way is simply, with our antecedent prejudices removed, to read and re-read some of the best epiphany scenes; those, for instance, which close the _Electra_, the _Hippolytus_, the _Rhesus_ or the _Andromache_. We have already seen in the _Electra_ how the poet can use his gods for delivering his essential moral judgment on the story; the condemnation of revenge, the pity for mankind, the opening up of a larger atmosphere in which the horror through which we have just passed falls into its due resting-place. In the _Hippolytus_ the sheer beauty of the Artemis scene speaks for itself and makes a marvellous ending. Notably it attains an effect which could scarcely be reached in any other way, a strange poignant note amid the beauty, where mortal emotion breaks against the cliffs of immortal calm. After many words of tenderness Artemis finishes (1437 ff.): Farewell! I may not watch man's fleeting breath, Nor stain mine eyes with the effluence of death. And sure that terror now is very near. . . . (_The Goddess slowly rises and floats away._) HIPPOLYTUS Farewell! Farewell, most blessed! Lift thee clear Of soiling men. Thou wilt not grieve in heaven For our long love. . . . Father, thou art forgiven; It was Her will; I am not wroth with thee. . . . I have obeyed her all my days! Of course the epiphany does not give what our jaded senses secretly demand, a strong "curtain." It gives the antique peaceful close. The concrete men and women whom we have seen before us, striving and suffering, dissolve into the beautiful mist of legend; strife and passion and sharp cries sink away into the telling of old fables; then the fables themselves have their lines of consequence reaching out to touch the present world and the thing that we are doing now; to make it the fulfilment of an ancient command or prophecy, to give it a meaning that we had never realized; and thus we are awakened to the concrete theatre and the audience and the life about us not with a shock but gradually, like one lying with his eyes half shut and thinking about a dream that has just gone. I do not for a moment say that the divine epiphany is the right, or even the best, way of ending any tragedy; I only plead that if we use our imaginations we can find in it a very rare beauty and can understand why one of the greatest of the world's dramatists held to it so firmly. CHAPTER IX THE ART OF EURIPIDES CONTINUED: THE CHORUS: CONCLUSION And lastly there is the Chorus, at once the strangest and the most beautiful of all these ancient and remote conventions. If we can understand the Chorus we have got to the very heart of Greek tragedy.