SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 201 



of the Restoration, and familiar to the earliest associations 

 of his hearers. This subject, and this alone, met all the 

 demands both of living poetic production and of antique 

 form the action grandly simple, the personages few, the 

 protagonist at once a victim of Divine judgment and an 

 executor of Divine retribution, an intense personal sym 

 pathy in the poet himself, and no strangeness to the 

 habitual prepossessions of those he addressed to be over 

 come 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 

 &quot;Agonistes&quot; is still fresh and strong as morning, but 

 where are &quot; Oaractacus &quot; and &quot;Elfrida?&quot; Nay, where is 

 the far better work of a far abler man where is 

 &quot;Merope?&quot; If the frame of mind which performs 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 

 &quot; Merope &quot; 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 &quot; Merope,&quot; 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 

 &quot;Merope &quot; 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. 



