SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 167 



secondary characters are apt to indulge, though in the original 

 they may interest us as being natural and characteristic. In the 

 Gersnan-silver of the modern we get something of this kind, 

 which does not please us the more by being cut up into single 

 lines that recall the outward semblance of some pages in 

 Sophocles. We find it cheaper to make a specimen than to 

 borrow one. 



CHORUS. Foolish who bites off nose, his face to spite. 

 OUTIS. Who fears his fate, him Fate shall one day spurn. 

 CHORUS. The gods themselves are pliable to Fate. 

 OUTIS. The strong self-ruler dreads no other sway. 

 CHORUS. Sometimes the shortest way goes most about. 

 OUTIS. Why fetch a compass, having stars within ? 

 CHORUS. A shepherd once, I know that stars may set. 

 OUTIS. That thou led st sheep fits not for leading men. 

 CHORUS. To sleep-sealed eyes the wolf-dog barks in vain. 



We protest that we have read something very like this, we 

 will not say where, and we might call it the battledore and 

 shuttlecock style of dialogue, except that the players do not 

 seem to have any manifest relation to each other, but each is 

 intent on keeping his own bit of feathered cork continually in 

 the air. 



The first sincerely popular yearning toward antiquity, the first 

 germ of Schiller s Cotter Griechenland s, is to be found in the 

 old poem of Tanhauser, very nearly coincident with the begin 

 nings of the Reformation. And if we might allegorize it, we 

 should say that it typified precisely that longing after Venus, 

 under her other name of Charis, which represents the relation in 

 which modern should stand to ancient art. It is the grace of 

 the Greeks, their sense of proportion, their distaste for the 

 exaggerated, their exquisite propriety of phrase, which steadies 

 imagination without cramping it it is these that we should 

 endeavour to assimilate without the loss of our own individu 

 ality. We should quicken our sense of form by intelligent 

 sympathy with theirs, and not stiffen it into formalism by a 

 servile surrender of what is genuine in us to what w as genuine 

 in them. A pure form, says Schiller, helps and sustains, an 

 impure one hinders and shatters. But we should remember 

 that the spirit of the age must enter as a modifying principle, 

 not only into ideas, but into the best manner of their expression. 

 The old bottles will not always serve for the new wine. A prin 

 ciple of life is the first requirement of all art, and it can only be 

 communicated by the touch of the time and a simple faith in it; 

 all else is circumstantial and secondary. The Greek tragedy 

 passed through the three natural stages of poetry the imagi- 



