ary study. It shows what writers fell under the spell of Euripides; who ignored or were repelled by him; what qualities in him attracted this man or that, one age or another; what poets as different as Virgil, Milton and Racine owed to the Greek; how different epochs understood or misunderstood him; how his successive creditors borrowed and used their borrowings. It raises the whole question of literary imitation and literary inspiration, their nature, methods and limits. All this is a fascinating study in literary criticism. But it carries with it something more. It has a human interest of its own, for it is a study in the psychology of many men and diverse ages, and it gives some answer to the question, what is permanent in literature, what is transitory; what flames blaze brightly in their own generation and are extinct in the next, what lights, once lit, burn for ever.

R. W. LIVINGSTONE

Fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford

PREFACE

"Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers died in bearing them; the secret of our paternity lies in their graves and we must go there to learn it." HERMAN MELVILLE

T is said," writes Gibbon, "that the foolish

curiosity of Elagabalus attempted to dis

cover from the quantity of spider-webs the number of the inhabitants of Rome." It is not, perhaps, really a much wiser curiosity that hopes to determine by raking in the cobwebs of libraries the undying influence of one dead mind on a hundred subsequent generations. In each of them only a tiny minority has written books that endure; from a criticism here, an imitation there, we have to divine what Euripides meant to the writers and to their voiceless contemporaries, to the spirit of a whole era. When we speak of the influence of Euripides, we are concerned not only with its obvious manifestations, those revivals and remaniements of which even this jaded age is not yet weary (as I write, the Alcestis has

just been performed in that stronghold of the Middle Ages, the Glastonbury of Arthur and Joseph of Arimathea, and Medea is appearing on the London stage); his tradition lives on in far other, subtler ways as well. The seamen of the Napoleonic Wars who miscalled their ship the "Billy Ruffian" or those who in the last great struggle manned the "Niffie Jane," knew nothing of the author of Bellerophon and Iphigenia, but here too, ultimately, is the influence of Euripides. The working of a great spirit is a silent, subtle thing-"closer is He than breathing and nearer than hands and feet." With the passing of the years it becomes an imperceptible part of the intellectual atmosphere of the world; as the fine dust of a bursting volcano at the Antipodes has, weeks after, kindled to unwonted splendour the sunsets of another hemisphere. Chapter and verse citations of allusions and borrowings can give only a fragmentary record of such an influence; and even that fragment is apt to be garbled by critics hungry for striking results. An Emil Reich will "explain" that wild adventure, the French Revolution, by the influence in the nurseries of France of a newly translated Robinson Crusoe; a Churton Collins by

a tireless accumulation of parallel platitudes will detect in Shakespeare the influence of almost every Greek poet extant. I can promise no such fireworks; and all that can here be attempted is some account of the effect on a number of playwrights and some thinkers and famous men of Euripides the Dramatist and Poet-Philosopher. For in this double aspect antiquity always saw him, honouring alike the creator and the critic of life; whereas the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thought of him, for better or worse, purely as a playwright; and now the late nineteenth and the twentieth, disgorging tome after tome on the Ideas of Euripides, seem in some danger of forgetting that he was after all dramatist, not pamphleteer. It is mainly with his influence on the drama, the most Greek of all our artsGreek indeed down to its very terminology, "tragedy" and "comedy," "prologue" and "epilogue," "orchestra" and "scene"-that we shall be concerned; yet not forgetting that, quite outside the stage-door, there lies a different interest, deeper than can attach to dreary lists of poetasters who have botched up his plays and of criticasters who have pulled them to pieces-the interest of following from age to