160 SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES, 



for Hamlet, who so perfectly typifies the introversion and com 

 plexity of modern thought as compared with ancient, in dealing 

 with the problems of life and action. It was not perhaps with 

 out intention (for who may venture to assume a want of intention 

 in the world s highest poetic genius at its full maturity ?) that 

 Shakespeare brings in his hero fresh from the University of 

 Wittenberg, where Luther, who entailed upon us the respon 

 sibility of private judgment, had been Professor. The dramatic 

 motive in the Electra and Hamlet is essentially the same, 

 but what a difference between the straightforward bloody- 

 mindedness of Orestes and the metaphysical punctiliousness of 

 the Dane ! Yet each was natural in his several way, and each 

 would have been unintelligible to the audience for which the 

 other was intended. That Fate which the Greeks made to 

 operate from without, we recognise at work within in some vice 

 of character or hereditary predisposition. Hawthorne, the most 

 profoundly ideal genius of these latter days, was continually re- 

 uirning, more or less directly, to this theme ; and his * Marble 

 Faun, whether consciously or not, illustrates that invasion of 

 the aesthetic by the moral which has confused art by dividing 

 its allegiance, and dethroned the old dynasty without as yet 

 firmly establishing the new in an acknowledged legitimacy. 

 \ Atalanta in Calydon shows that poverty of thought and 

 \ profusion of imagery which are at once the defect and the com- 

 pcnsation of all youthful poetry, even of Shakespeare s. It 

 seems a paradox to say that there can be too much poetry in a 

 poem, and yet this is a fault with which all poets begin, and 

 which some never get over. But Atlalanta is hopefully dis 

 tinguished, in a rather remarkable way, from most early attempts, 

 by a sense of form and proportion, which, if seconded by a 

 seasonable ripening of other faculties, as we may fairly expect, 

 gives promise of rare achievement hereafter. Mr. Swinburne s 

 power of assimilating style, which is, perhaps, not so auspicious 

 a symptom, strikes us as something marvellous. The argument 

 of his poem, in its quaint archaism, would not need the change 

 cf a word or in the order of a period to have been foisted on 

 Sir Thomas Malory as his own composition. The choosing a 

 theme which yEschylus had handled in one of his lost tragedies 

 is justified by a certain ^Eschylean flavour in the treatment. 

 The opening, without deserving to be called a mere imitation, 

 recalls that of the Agamemnon, and the chorus has often an 

 imaginative lift in it, an ethereal charm of phrase, of which it is 

 the highest praise to say that it reminds us of him who soars 

 over the other Greek tragedians like an eagle. 



