" THE BACCHANTS OF EURIPIDES." •
IN what is perhaps the most beautiful of his epigrams, the poet Ausonius addresses his old tutor, Nepotianus, as "lotentis agitator mete," and the happy phrase may be transferred with peculiar fitness to Dr. VerralL No scholar • The Bacchants of Euripides, and other -Essays. By A. W. Vezza/J, LULUS Cambridge : at The 'University Press. [10.1. net.] of our day has a greater power of• stirring and even " agitating " the mind. Quiescence and acquiescence are intellectual states of which he is at once incapable and intolerant. He neither rests himself nor allows others to rest. He takes familiar words which for twenty centuries had been held to have a certain definite meaning, and proceeds remorselessly to inquire whether they do not mean something entirely different, or at least suggest some altogether new train of thought. Even Horace in his hands becomes no, longer the poet who suits best an idle hour and slippered ease, but one in whom we must painfully seek for enigmatic hints at dark and eventful tragedies; while students who thought that they understood .4Eschylus can hardly, we think, read his comments on the Agamemnon or the Eumenides without receiving some shock to their self- complacency. And it is just because he has this rare gift of disturbing mental equilibrium that Dr. Verrall is exactly suited to be an interpreter of Euripides. That great writer, the Bernard Shaw of antiquity, is the real originator of "the problem play." Master though he is of the emotions, so that Aristotle even calls him "the most tragic of the poets, he appeals not less forcibly to the intellect. He does not attempt to dominate or control it, but sets it working for itself, puzzles, perplexes, irritates his reader, does anything, in fact, so long as he can stir the mind into activity. That is, we think, a characteristic of almost all his work, and it is cer- tainly a distinguishing feature of the Bacchants. It is the poet's latest legacy to the world; it is, as Macaulay says, "a most glorious play," and "as a, piece of language hardly equalled anywhere ; " but it is also a play about the purpose of which critics have always been at variance. Some call it "a recantation" of the writer's previous scepticism; others see in it only a splendid picture of the madness that is born of superstition, and the play itself affords ample argument in support of either view. But Dr. Verrall, largely influenced by Mr. Norwood's recent work," The Riddle of the Bacchze,"* endeavours to reconcile the apparent contradictions of the tragedy. Euripides, he holds, equally understands both faith and doubt. Both go to the making of our human nature, and the true dramatic artist must take both into his purview and accept the contradictions they inevitably bring with them. The worshippers of Dionysus are, the poet knows, the victims of strong delusion, but the spirit which ani:nates them, the divine madness which raises them, as it were, into another world, he can both admire and portray. When, for example, he tells us how, while the Bacchants held their revels on Cithaeron- "All the mountain felt
And worshipped with them ; and the wild things knelt And ramped and gloried, and the wilderness Was filled with moving voices and dim stress," he knows that his words do not describe realities, but he knows also that they describe feelings which are not only real
but also full of poetry and beauty. "It is a lovely imagination," writes Dr. Verrall, "responding to the deepest desires, instincts, cravings of spiritual man, that spiritual rapture should find an echo in the material world ; that in mental communion with God we should find sensible com- .munion with nature ; and that, when the faithful rejoice together, bird, and beast, bill and forest, should be not felt only, but seen to rejoice along with them. It is not the truth ; between us and our environment, whatever links there are, this link is wanting. But the yearning for it, the passion which made Wordsworth cry out for something, even were it the imagination of a pagan, which would make him `less forlorn,' is natural to man; and simplicity leaps at the lovely fiction of a response. Just here is the opportunity for such alliances between spiritualism and superstition as are the daily despair of seekers after truth. Euripides rejects the fiction; but he does not commit the common, though suicidal, error of rationalism by disguising or depreciating the loveliness." And with this criticism we are fully in accord. It is criticism, we think, which goes below the surface. It penetrates, as it were, into the workings of the poet's mind and, by so doing, compels us to look into our own and see whether there is no conteoadiction there, whether " spiritualism and superstition" are less interwoven into our own lives than into the plot of the Bacchz.
Unhappily, however, Dr. Verrall does not always write like • .. s Bovieired ha the Spectator, October lOth. 1908. this. He limes not only to inspire but to irritate. With the rarest gifts of insight and interpretation he combines a curious passion for what is merely ingenious and astute. At one point, for instance, in this play Dionysus leads King Pentheus into the palace, saying that he "will drive him out of his wits by putting in him light frenzy," and accordingly, when he brings him out again, he describes him as "craving to see things forbidden [i.e., the revels of the Bacchie women] and zealous with an evil zeal;" while the first words of Pentheus are that he now "sees two suns and a twofold Thebes." And all this seems quite natural, although a poet less " human" than Euripides might have shrunk from making Pentheus " see double," but Dr. Verrall finds it inexplicable. He therefore insists that the actor who uses the words "putting in him light frenzy" indicates by a gesture that he has some "intoxicating drug" concealed about his person, of which he proposes to give the monarch a dose ; then for the words oseieaoprrL acrroaa.trra, which are obviously right, he restores the reading ere_OPT; which all editors have rejected, in order to show that Pentheus had been drugged while "making libations not to be desired ;" and later on, when the Chorus extols the god for slaying the unhappy King, "who took the woman-garb and the thyrsus-wand that was (assured P) death" (pcipened TE Trterbr ''Aeariv (Au13€1, fOuperov), he argues that the word ed.peeE hints at the "hollow stalk" or "capsule" in which the drug was concealed, and that IrlfIrT6S 'AIBV means "potable death." What it does mean is, no doubt, obscure, but such a phrase as "a capsule, potable death," though it might, perhaps, have some esoteric meaning to a chemist in the State of Maine, is assuredly in itself unintelligible and absurd, while we hardly think that Dr. Verrall's other suggestions• will commend themselves to those who love sobriety and common-sense.
The remainder of the volume contains seven shorter essays on different subjects. All are of much value, while two of them—one on the use of rhyme in Greek poetry, and another dealing with St. Luke's account of " Christ before Herod "- are remarkable for their combination of rare scholarship with striking originality. In fact, throughout this work the reader will never find a dull page. He may agree or disagree ; he may be moved to admiration or amazement : but he will certainly never go to sleep. That is the one thing which Dr. Verrall never allows. He compels yon, whether you will or no, to be alive, awake, alert. That is his great distinction as a scholar. Others, perhaps, may be his equals in learning ; and many, no doubt, are more sober in their judgment; but in that power of " stirring the mind " which is the supreme requisite in a great teacher he has to-day, we think, no rival. He has done much for classical literature ; his inspiring influence will, we believe, be even more largely felt in the new Chair of English Literature at Cambridge to which he has been most justly and most happily appointed.
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