The imitative arts would draw from it altogether new
motives of freedom and energy, of freshness in old forms. It is from
this fantastic scene that the beautiful wind-touched draperies, the
rhythm, the heads suddenly thrown back, of many a Pompeian wall-
painting and sarcophagus-frieze are originally derived; and that
melting languor, that perfectly [59] composed lassitude of the fallen
Maenad, became a fixed type in the school of grace, the school of
Praxiteles.
The circumstances of the place thus combining with his peculiar
motive, Euripides writes the Bacchanals. It is this extravagant
phase of religion, and the latest-born of the gods, which as an
amende honorable to the once slighted traditions of Greek belief, he
undertakes to interpret to an audience composed of people who, like
Scyles, the Hellenising king of Scythia, feel the attraction of Greek
religion and Greek usage, but on their quainter side, and partly
relish that extravagance. Subject and audience alike stimulate the
romantic temper, and the tragedy of the Bacchanals, with its
innovations in metre and diction, expressly noted as foreign or
barbarous--all the charm and grace of the clear-pitched singing of
the chorus, notwithstanding--with its subtleties and sophistications,
its grotesques, mingled with and heightening a real shudder at the
horror of the theme, and a peculiarly fine and human pathos, is
almost wholly without the reassuring calm, generally characteristic
of the endings of Greek tragedy: is itself excited, troubled,
disturbing--a spotted or dappled thing, like the oddly dappled fawn-
skins of its own masquerade, so aptly expressive of the shifty,
twofold, rapidly-doubling genius of the divine, wild creature
himself.
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