VIII.—EURIPIDES. THE FOUR FEMINIST PLAYS The three main interests of Euripides’ mind, realist, pacificist and feminist—to use our ugly jargon—are to be found in all his theatre; but there are four plays which are especially concerned with the relations between women and men, the Alcestis, Medea, Ion and Andromache. They are not pleasant plays: indeed, to a lover of sentimental idealism they would be conspicuously unpleasant if they were fully understood. Nor are they to be recommended to women readers. The relations between the sexes are a delicate thing; and human nature, male humanity at any rate, is generally none the worse for discreet reticence and tender handling. But in these plays Euripides uses the surgeon’s knife. They were meant for an audience of men, grown callous by time and custom; and the treatment is ruthless. They should be regarded as the painful but necessary operation, needed to rid a patient of some long-festering ulcer, and the dramatist deserves the thanks that we give to the skillful surgeon. The particular flaws in the male character with which Euripides deals in the four plays are these—meanness, cowardice, selfishness, and treachery. They are not the faults, it will be noticed, that are especially appropriate to a ruling class. Man is not indicted on the score of haughtiness, pride or cruelty: his weaknesses are of a less ‘manly’ sort. It is his position as the natural lord of creation that is questioned and put to the test of dramatic action. If Jason, Admetus, Apollo and Menelaus are _impossible_ characters, then Euripides fails altogether in his lesson: if their actions, though possible, are improbable, then again he fails in an artistic sense. Some may think that no one could be quite so mean as Jason, quite so cowardly and selfish as Apollo and Admetus, quite so treacherous as Menelaus; but if we apply the test of experience, the cruel facts of life will justify the poet. None of the four are ‘tragedies,’ in the sense in which we use the word. They are as good examples as we are ever likely to see of ‘la haute comédie’; the Ion and Andromache, perhaps, a little melodramatic, the Alcestis and the Medea in places almost farcical; but all depending eventually on a subtle study of psychology and social relationships. It is probable that they were not originally composed for public representation in the great theatre of Dionysus. They are intimate studies of humanity and can quite easily be divested of the official chorus, prologue and epilogue, which are independent of the dramatic action of the play. What is left is Euripides’ own teaching, put as plainly as the ironical spirit will allow. The frequency of translation must not blind us to the fact that in essentials Euripides is untranslatable. He is one of the greatest masters of irony and there is nothing that is so apt to vanish in translation, or create confusion in the English mind.