SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 197 



the artist and of the time. Faust may believe he is gazing 

 on &quot; the face that launched a thousand ships,&quot; 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 Shake 

 speare 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 

 must be a study from the life, and not from the scholiasts. 

 Theocritus lets us into the secret of his good poetry, when 

 he makes Daphnis tell us that he preferred his rock with a 

 view of the Siculian Sea to the kingdom of Pelops. 



It is one of the marvels of the human mind, this sorcery 

 which the fiend of technical imitation weaves about his 

 victims, giving a phantasmal Helen to their arms, and mak 

 ing an image of the brain seem substance. Men still pain 

 themselves to write Latin verses, matching their wooden 

 bits of phrase together as children do dissected maps, and 

 measuring the value of what they have done, not by any 

 standard of intrinsic merit, but by the difficulty of doing 

 it. Petrarch expected to be known to posterity by his 

 &quot;Africa.&quot; Gray hoped to make a Latin poem his monu 

 ment. Goethe, who was classic in the only way it is now 

 possible to be classic, in his &quot;Hermann and Dorothea,&quot; 

 and at least Propertian in his &quot; Roman Idyls,&quot; wasted his 

 time and thwarted his creative energy on the mechanical 

 mock-antique of an unreadable &quot; Achilleis.&quot; Landor prized 



