SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 159 



forerunner. It is a true poem, and seldom breaks from the 

 maidenly reserve which should characterise the higher forms of 

 poetry, even in the keenest energy of expression. If the blank 

 verse be a little mannered and stiff, reminding one of Landor in 

 his attempts to reproduce the antique, the lyrical parts are lyrical 

 in the highest sense, graceful, flowing, and generally simple in 

 sentiment and phrase. There are some touches of nature in 

 the mother s memories of Althea, so sweetly pathetic that they 

 go as right to the heart as they came from it, and are nether 

 Greek nor English, but broadly human. And yet, when we had 

 read the book through, we felt as if we were leaving a world of 

 shadows, inhabited by less substantial things than that neither 

 realm of Homer where the very eidolon of Achilles is still real 

 to us in its longings and regrets. These are not characters, but 

 outlines after the Elgin marbles in the thinnest manner of Flax- 

 man. There is not so much blood in the whole of them as 

 would warm the little finger of one of Shakespeare s living and 

 breathing conceptions. We could not help thinking of those 

 exquisite verses addressed by Schiller to Goethe, in which, 

 while he expresses a half-truth so eloquently as almost to make 

 it seem a whole one, he touches unconsciously the weak point 

 of their common striving after a Grecian instead of a purely 

 human ideal. 



Doch leicht gezimmert nur 1st Thespis Wagen, 

 Und er ist gleich dem acheront schen Kahn ; 

 Nur Schatten und Idole kann er tragen, 

 Und drangt das rohe Leben sich heran, 

 So droht das leichte Fahrzeug umzuschlagen 

 Das nur die flucht gen Geister fassen kann ; 

 Der Schein soil nie die Wirklichkeh erreichen 

 Und siegt Natur, so muss die Kunst entweichen. 



The actors in the drama are unreal and shadowy, the motives 

 which actuate them alien to our modern modes of thought and 

 conceptions of character. To a Greek, the element of Fate, 

 with which his imagination was familiar, while it heightened the 

 terror of the catastrophe, would have supplied the place of that 

 impulse in mere human nature which our habit of mind demands 

 for its satisfaction. The fulfilment of an oracle, the anger of a 

 deity, the arbitrary doom of some blind and purposeless power 

 superior to man, the avenging of blood to appease an injured 

 ghost, any one of these might make that seem simply natural 

 to a contemporary of Sophocles which is intelligible to us only 

 by study and reflection. It is not a little curious that Shake 

 speare should have made the last of the motives we have just 

 mentioned, and which was conclusive for Orestes, insufficient 



