Jason is a superb study—a compound of brilliant manner, stupidity, and cynicism. If only his own desires, interests, and comforts are safe, he is prepared to confer all kinds of benefits. The kindly, breezy words which he addresses to his little sons must have made hundreds of excellent fathers in the audience feel for a moment a touch of personal baseness—“am I not something like this?” That is the moral of Jason and countless personages of Euripides: they are so detestable and yet so like ourselves. Jason indeed dupes himself as well as others. He really thinks he is kind and gentle, when he is only surrendering to an emotional atmosphere. His great weakness is the mere perfection of his own egotism; he has no power at all to realize another’s point of view. Throughout the play he simply refuses to believe that Medea feels his desertion as she asserts. For him her complaints are “empty words”.[433] To the very end his self-centred stupidity is almost pathetic: “didst thou _in truth_ determine on their death for the sake of wifely honour?”[434] One of the most deadly things in the play hangs on this blindness. Medea has just asked him, with whatever smile she can summon up, to induce “your wife” to procure pardon for the children. Jason, instead of destroying himself on the spot in self-contempt, replies courteously: “By all means; and I imagine that I shall persuade her, _if she is like the rest of women_”.[435] Considering all the circumstances, this is perhaps unsurpassed for shameless brutality. Medea, however, with a gleam in her eye which one may imagine, answers with equal urbanity, even with quiet raillery. She has perhaps no reason to complain; it is precisely this portentous insensibility which will secure her success. The minor characters are, in their degree, excellently drawn—Creon above all. His short scene is unforgettable; it is that familiar sight—a weak man encouraging himself to firmness by exaggerating his own severity. His delicious little grumble, “my chivalrous instincts have got me into trouble more often than I like to think of,”[436] stamps him as the peer of Dogberry and Justice Shallow. As a piece of Greek, the _Medea_ is perhaps the finest work of Euripides. The iambics have a simple brilliance and flexible ease which had been unknown hitherto, and which indeed were never rivalled afterwards. Such things as σὺ γὰρ τί μ’ ἠδίκηκας; ἐξέδου κόρην ὅτῳ σε θυμὸς ἦγεν,[437] in Medea’s appeal to Creon, or Jason’s rebuke to her: πᾶν κέρδος ἡγοῦ ζημιουμένη φυγῇ,[438] or the expression of her “melting mood”: ἔτικτον αὐτούς· ζῆν δ’ ὅτ’ ἐξηύχου τέκνα, εἰσῆλθέ μ’ οἶκτος εἰ γενήσεται τάδε,[439]