SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. iC; 



to be overcome before he could touch their hearts or be sure of 

 aid from their imaginations. To compose such a drama on 

 such a theme was to be Greek, and not to counterfeit it ; for 

 Samson was to Milton traditionally just what Herakles was to 

 Sophocles, and personally far more. The Agonistes is still 

 fresh and strong as morning, but where are Caractacus and 

 Elfrida ? Nay, where is the far better work of a far abler 

 man where is Merope? If the frame of mind which per 

 forms a deliberate experiment were the same as that which 

 produces poetry vitalised through and through by the conspiring 

 ardours of every nobler passion and power of the soul, then 

 Merope might have had some little space of life. But without 

 colour, without harmonious rhythm of movement, with less 

 passion than survived in an average Grecian ghost, and all this 

 from the very theory of her creation, she has gone back, a 

 shadow, to join her shadowy Italian and French namesakes in 

 that limbo of things that would be and cannot be. Mr. Arnold 

 but retraces, in his Preface to Merope/ the arguments of Mason 

 in the letters prefixed to his classical experiments. What finds 

 defenders, but not readers, may be correct, classic, right in 

 principle, but it is not poetry of that absolute kind which may 

 and does help men, but needs no help of theirs ; and such surely 

 we have a right to demand in tragedy, if nowhere else. We 

 should not speak so unreservedly if we did not set a high value 

 on Mr. Arnold and his poetic gift. But * Merope has that one 

 fault against which the very gods, we are told, strive in vain. It 

 is dull, and the seed of this dulness lay in the system on which 

 it was written. 



Pseudo-classicism takes two forms. Sometimes, as Mr. 

 Landor has done, it attempts truth of detail to ancient scenery 

 and manners, which may be attained either by hard reading 

 and good memory, or at a cheaper rate from such authors a 3 

 Becker. The Moretum/ once attributed to Virgil, and the idyl 

 of Theocritus lately chosen as a text by Mr. Arnold, are interest 

 ing, because they describe real things ; but the mock-antique, 

 if not true, is nothing; and how true such poems are likely to bo 

 we can judge by * Punch s success at Yankeeisms, by all Eng 

 land s accurate appreciation of the manners and minds of a 

 contemporary people one with herself in language, laws, religion, 

 and literature. The eye is the only note-book of the true poet ; 

 but a patchwork of second-hand memories is a laborious futility, 

 hard to write arid harder to read, with about as much nature in 

 it as a dialogue of the Dcipnosophists. Alexander s bushel of 



