SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. l6l 



But in spite of many merits, we cannot help asking ourselves, 

 as we close the book, whether Atalanta J can be called a success, 

 and if so, whether it be a success in the right direction. The 

 poem reopens a question which in some sort touches the very 

 life of modern literature. We do not mean to renew the old 

 quarrel of Fontenelle s day as to the comparative merits of 

 ancients and moderns. That is an affair of taste, which does not 

 admit of any authoritative settlement. Our concern is about a 

 principle which certainly demands a fuller discussion, and which 

 is important enough to deserve it. Do we show our appreciation 

 of the Greeks most wisely in attempting the mechanical repro 

 duction of their forms, or by endeavouring to comprehend the 

 thoughtful spirit of full-grown manhood in which they wrought, 

 to kindle ourselves by the emulation of it, and to bring it to bear 

 with all its plastic force upon our wholly new conditions of life 

 and thought? It seems to us that the question is answered by 

 the fact, patent in the history of all the fine arts, that every 

 attempt at reproducing a bygone excellence by external imita 

 tion of it, or even by applying the rules which analytic criticism 

 has formulated from the study of it, has resulted in producing 

 the artificial, and not the artistic. That most subtile of all 

 essences in physical organisation, which eludes chemist, ana 

 tomist, and microscopist, the life, is in aesthetics not less shy of 

 the critic, and will not come forth in obedience to his most 

 learned spells ; for the very good reason that it cannot, because 

 in all works of art it is the joint product of the artist and of the 

 time. Faust may believe he is gazing on * the face that launched 

 a thousand ships, but Mephistopheles knows very well that it is 

 only shadows that he has the skill to conjure. He is not merely 

 the spirit that ever denies, but the spirit also of discontent with 

 the present, that material in which every man shall work who 

 will achieve realities and not their hollow semblance. The true 

 anachronism, in our opinion, is not in Shakspeare s making 

 Ulysses talk as Lord Bacon might, but in attempting to make 

 him speak in a dialect of thought utterly dead to all present 

 comprehension. Ulysses was the type of long-headedness ; and 

 the statecraft of an Ithacan cateran would have seemed as 

 childish to the age of Elizabeth and Burleigh as it was naturally 

 sufficing to the first hearers of Homer. Ulysses, living in Florence 

 during the fifteenth century, might have been Macchiavelli ; in 

 France, during the seventeenth, Cardinal Richelieu ; in America, 

 during the nineteenth, Abraham Lincoln, but not Ulysses. 

 Truth to nature can be reached ideally, never historically; it 



