So it is that we can judge the poet of “the Greek enlightenment”[856]—or rather of the Athenian disillusionment—better than most generations of his readers. To aid us, there have naturally arisen writers to voice, in a manner often like his, our own disappointment and our renewed interest in parts of life and the world which we had ignored as unmeaning or barren. The disinherited are coming into their own. Mr. Thomas Hardy has written of the English peasant with a richness and profundity unknown since Shakespeare. He offers indeed another interesting analogy with Euripides: while the critics are concerned with his “pessimism” he remains for an unsophisticated reader a splendid witness to the majesty and charm of the immense slow curves of life, the deep preciousness which glows from the gradual processes of nature and that dignity of mere existence which survives all sin and effort. _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ is the best modern parallel to _Hippolytus_. Meanwhile M. Anatole France has given us many an example of that ironical wit of which the Greek poet is so consummate a master. Another Frenchman, Flaubert, has set as the climax to his dazzling phantasy, _La Tentation de St. Antoine_, an expression in un-attic vehemence and elaboration of that passionate sympathy with all existence which blazes in the lyrics of the _Bacchæ_—a yearning which Arnold in the _Scholar-Gipsy_ has uttered in milder and still more haunting language. There is no final synthesis of Euripides. Throughout his life he held true to those two principles, the worship of beauty, and loyalty to the dry light of intelligence. Glamour never blinded him to sin and folly; misery and coarse tyranny never taught his lips to forswear the glory of existence. One of his own noblest songs sets this triumphantly before us[857]:— οὐ παύσομαι τὰς Χάριτας Μούσαις συγκαταμειγνύς, ἁδίσταν συζυγίαν. μὴ ζῴην μετ’ ἀμουσίας, αἰεὶ δ’ ἐν στεφάνοισιν εἴην. “I will not cease to mingle the Graces with the Muses—the sweetest of fellowships. When the Muses desert me, let me die; may the flower-garlands never fail me.” The Graces and the Muses—such is his better way of invoking Beauty and Truth, the two fixed stars of his life-long allegiance. CHAPTER VI METRE AND RHYTHM IN GREEK TRAGEDY § I. INTRODUCTION Poetry is illuminating utterance consisting of words the successive sounds of which are arranged according to a recurrent pattern. The soul of poetry is this illumination, its body this recurrent pattern of sounds; and it is with the body that we are now to deal. At the outset we must distinguish carefully between rhythm and metre. Rhythm is the recurrence just mentioned—the structure; metre is the gathering together of sounds into masses upon which rhythm shall do its work. Metre, so to put it, makes the bricks, while rhythm makes the arch.